Mitchell Johnson is exhibiting seven large-scale work within the foyer of the San Francisco skyscraper 425 Market Avenue from March 17 to Might 30. Works embrace “Trinity East (Iceberg)” (2020–2024), 78×120 inches, made after a 2018 journey to Newfoundland, in addition to three work of Johnson’s ongoing muse, the Presidio Park, with its peculiar, still-life-like assortment of buildings.
In interviews and essays, Johnson has persistently remarked on what seeing a Josef Albers/Giorgio Morandi exhibition in Bologna, Italy, in 2005 meant for his observe. That viewing cemented his change from a brushy, impressionistic paint utility in the direction of a extra geometrically minded strategy to composition and colour. The brand new giant work on this exhibit mix the geometric and colour issues with a return to a painterly floor.
Brenda Danilowitz from the Josef & Annie Albers Basis commented on the influence of Albers and Morandi on Johnson’s work:
“About midway into Mitchell Johnson’s 2014 monograph Shade as Content material there’s a portfolio of Josef Albers and Giorgio Morandi work juxtaposed one to a web page – taking a look at one another, so to talk. The photographs will not be accompanied by phrases, however they converse eloquently of Johnson’s admiration of and debt to those two quiet but lofty twentieth century masters. Albers exhibits his mastery of colour, area, and type. Morandi solutions with type, area and colour. No phrases wanted. In 2005 Johnson had come throughout an Albers exhibition in Morandi’s eponymous museum in Bologna and acknowledged that one thing exceptional occurred when these two unlikely comrades in artwork confronted each other. The upshot resonates in Mitchell Johnson’s work of the previous twenty years: exactly and meticulously organized colour and type play off one another in startling and lambent methods.”
In a 2025 Whitehot Journal article, Donald Kuspit writes concerning the Morandi/Albers affect:
“Morandi and Albers are Johnson’s function fashions or mentors. To my thoughts’s eye they’re phenomenologists par excellence, which is what Johnson is at his greatest—as in these work–aspires to be, nevertheless unwittingly. In response to the thinker Merleau-Ponty, within the Phenomenology of Notion, “Phenomenology is a transcendental philosophy which locations in abeyance the assertions arising out of the pure perspective, however it’s also a philosophy for which the world is ‘already there.’ It’s painstaking…in its attentiveness and marvel, its demand for consciousness.” Because the thinker John Cogan writes, in The Phenomenological Discount, “There may be an expertise by which it’s doable for us to return to the world with no information or preconceptions in hand; it’s the expertise of astonishment…within the expertise of astonishment, our on a regular basis ‘understanding,’ when in comparison with the understanding that we expertise in astonishment, is proven up as a pale epistemological imposter.” At their greatest, once they [Johnson’s paintings] have a sort of parsimonious aesthetic depth and nuanced exactitude, and now not register because the “belief-performance of our customary life on this planet,” they’re astonishing masterpieces of phenomenological notion, fraught with what the thinker George Santayana calls “hushed reverberations.”
Johnson’s work are within the everlasting collections of over 35 museums. In Might, his smaller work might be on view at Galerie Mercier in Paris, and in June, his work might be included in group exhibits on the Glass Home in New Canaan, Connecticut, and on the Cape Cod Museum of Artwork in Dennis, Masachussetts.
For extra data, go to mitchelljohnson.com and observe him on Instagram at @mitchell_johnson_artist.
