Truro Middle for the Arts at Citadel Hill in Massachusetts presents an exhibition of small work by California artist Mitchell Johnson from September 4 by means of 15. The gallery is open day by day from 12 to 5pm, with an artist reception on Thursday, September 5, from 4 to 6pm. Titled The place The Colours Are (Chosen Work 1989–2024), the present options works from New England, Europe, New York, Newfoundland, and California.
Artwork critic Donald Kuspit reviewed Johnson’s work in 2023 in Whitehot Journal, noting his issues for each artwork historical past and abstraction:
Artwork historical past insidiously echoes in — ingeniously informs — all of Johnson’s works. Johnson is a grasp of abstraction, as his oddly constructivist work present, however of unconscious feeling, for his geometry serves to comprise and with that management the sturdy emotions implicit in his sturdy colours. Other than that, his work are artwork traditionally essential, as a result of they seamlessly fuse abstraction and realism, which Kandinsky tore aside to the detriment of each whilst he acknowledged that they had been implicitly inseparable, tied collectively in a Gordian knot, as they masterfully are in Johnson’s work.
In a 2012 evaluation for Provincetown Arts, author Chris Busa explored the method Johnson takes in his work:
If a lot of Johnson’s work are titled after the locations that impressed them, no such locations really exist. Every one is a collage of compressed intimacies unfold out over the months it takes to color them. He has achieved what Edwin Dickinson referred to as “Premier Coup”, during which a portray is accomplished outside in a single blow. But his typical observe is to carry a portray for a number of months, or extra, within the studio, to see if a portray stands the take a look at of repeated trying, usually involving the method of reminiscence revision, the place a succession of impressions gained over weeks or months is expressed as steady move.
In 1990, Mitchell Johnson moved to Palo Alto, California, to work for the artist Sam Francis shortly after ending his MFA at Parsons College of Design in New York Metropolis. He spent the Nineties peregrinating between California, New York, and Europe as he created brushy landscapes and determine work. Within the 2000s, repeated journeys to the Danish island of Bornholm and an opportunity viewing of a Josef Albers/Giorgio Morandi exhibition in Bologna led to a decisive change in his method. Johnson shifted in the direction of a extra consciously organized image airplane, the place bigger shapes function scaffolding for commentary on the stress between artifical and naturally occurring coloration. His work are within the everlasting collections of over 30 museums.
For extra info, go to mitchelljohnson.com and comply with him on Instagram at @mitchell_johnson_artist.
Along with the Truro exhibition, Johnson’s work are the topic of a museum retrospective in Cap d’Ail, France, at Musée Villa les Camélias by means of September 29.
