Apocalypse House, Norbert H. Kox

"Contemporary religious painter Norbert Kox is one of America's most important Visionary artists. His self-described 'apocalyptic visual parables' utilize powerful symbolic metaphors aiming to shake modern man from his spiritual malaise and clear away centuries worth of mistranslations of the Bible." (Richard Metzger, Disinformation: The Interviews, p. 116).

Norbert Kox, born 1945, has created artwork since childhood, and is now receiving international acclaim for his paintings, sculptures and photography. He has painted in oils since 1963 and acrylic with oil since 1975. He has developed his own techniques of translucent acrylic glazing to produce the same intensely glowing effects and illusionary dimensional space that he achieves with oils. Kox's unique style and trademark glazing techniques are being imitated by other artists, but his paintings remain unmistakable to those in the know.

His artwork has been exhibited internationally (United States, The Bahamas, Australia, Denmark, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, France, England, Switzerland, and India) and has appeared in the New York Outsider Art Fair every year since 1994. He has participated in more than 75 juried group exhibitions, since 1989, and has had more than a dozen solo shows in the same period. His 1999 solo exhibit To Hell and Back at the Neville Museum, in Green Bay, Wisconsin attracted national media attention with many television broadcasts (even usurping "Top Story" attention from the Green Bay Packers). It remained in the news for 3.5 months and was the topic of several radio talk shows.

During a span of nine years his works were exhibited in seven out of ten shows at the American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) in Baltimore, Maryland (AVAM is # 4 on the list of the top 25 museums in America).

Special awards and recognition:

In 1999 Kox was presented as one of The 100 Most Interesting People of The 20th Century in Northeastern Wisconsin. (Green Bay Press-Gazaette, Friday December 31, 1999. Special Millennium Edition, THE COLLECTABLES OF THE CENTURY.)

In 2009, Norbert Kox was recognized by the Bahamian Government Ministry of Tourism and awarded with an official Certificate of Appreciation for his promotion of Bimini through his art.

Kox received the 2012 Wisconsin Visual Artist Lifetime Achievement Award to join notable past recipients like Frank Loyd Wright.

"Norbert Kox lives today as a semi-hermit...But he is not alone since God (and God's stark message) is ever present in his meditative prayer, in the "bible codes" he finds in a computerized grid of Hebrew letters, and in his lushly visionary paintings and gothic constructions. Increasingly famous and infamous now for his prophetic images that challenge mainstream religious pieties, Kox is a benign, humble, and intelligent man. Clearly at peace with himself, he does not, however, shy away from confronting us with God's apocalyptic warnings and encrypted revelations. But there are always flashes of light and spirit within the darkness - signs of hope and renewal...powerfully communicating God's most secret messages through his intensely glowing paintings (he has developed his own techniques of translucent acrylic glazing) and biblically haunted found-object assemblages. Despite the fear that his work sometimes engenders, he has had increasing national success as an artist with a provocatively disturbing vision of the end-time. Most recently, he has been retreating from the bitter Wisconsin winters to the tropical sun of Bimini, and it seems that he has tempered some of the harsh cartoon evil portrayed in many of the early paintings. But no matter how much his recent work shows an ameliorating principle, Kox quietly and passionately persists in his attempt to unveil the mysteries of God's strange missives to humankind."

- Professor Norman J. Girardot (Curator, The End Is A New Beginning: Four Outsider Artists, 2000-2001, Zoellner Arts Center, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA)

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NORBERT H. KOX

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