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Bay Space artist Mitchell Johnson is exhibiting 35 work at 229 Hamilton Avenue in Palo Alto, California, a 3,000-square-foot gallery area previously occupied by Tempo Palo Alto. The gallery is open every day from 12 to 6pm (PT) by means of Thursday, August 3.
Palo Alto has performed a major position in Johnson’s life and profession. He moved there from NYC to work for Sam Francis and has since had quite a few exhibitions within the metropolis, however by no means a present of this scale. This exhibition, It Takes Time, contains 15 giant work Johnson centered on from 2019 to 2023. It’s an eclectic present that includes icebergs, boats, lifeguard stands, and views of San Francisco, New England, and New York. The widespread thread is colour issues; Johnson ceaselessly works on work for months, if not years, fastidiously tuning and adjusting colour relationships with the purpose of reaching distinctive and sudden commentary on our day-to-day environment. A collection of earlier small work is included to contextualize his 40-year profession.
Mitchell Johnson moved to Palo Alto, California, in 1990 shortly after ending his MFA at Parsons Faculty of Design in New York Metropolis. He spent the Nineteen 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 strategy. Johnson turned in the direction of a extra consciously organized image aircraft, the place bigger shapes are supposed to function scaffolding for commentary on the stress between artifical and naturally occurring colour. Land and clouds turned clusters of rooftops and cottages fastidiously noticed, but in addition fastidiously organized. Quilts of Tuscan fields turned water towers, picnic tables, and chairs.
Johnson’s obvious receptiveness to the work’ personal calls for was famous by the author Chris Busa in a 2012 Provincetown Arts article:
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 executed 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 movement.
Donald Kuspit not too long ago wrote:
Like all of Johnson’s works, a latent battle is constructed into the scene, within the type of usually abrupt contrasts of area and kind. Unusual as it could appear to say so, they’re implicitly psychodramas disguised as bodily drama. I’m arguing that they’ve an emotional innovative, making them greater than matter-of-factly descriptive and ingeniously summary.
Mitchell Johnson’s work can also be included in Springs Everlasting, a bunch exhibition curated by Alexander DiJulio on the Hearth Mission in East Hampton, New York, from July 22 by means of August 11.
For extra info, go to mitchelljohnson.com and observe him on Instagram at @mitchell_johnson_artist.
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