JASPER JOHNS

Johns is lending major works from his own collection to the exhibition, including paintings on long-term loan to the Art Institute of Chicago; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and Philadelphia Art Museum. Other notable lenders include The Broad, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; with additional works from private collectors.

Johns has redirected the course of contemporary art many times over a lengthy career. His introduction of the crosshatch in 1972 was an unforeseen development, representing a departure from his images of everyday objects, signs, and linguistic fragments—subjects he described as “things the mind already knows.” These allover compositions, characterized by parallel lines arrayed in interlocking configurations, and composed in encaustic, collage, acrylic and oil paint, watercolor, ink, and even sand, are admired for both their visual, material, and conceptual intricacy and their intuitively striking beauty.

Major works on view include definitive paintings from the Corpse and Mirror series (1974–84); the seminal Weeping Women (1975), with its allusions to Picasso’s oeuvre; and Dancers on a Plane (1980–81), a tribute to choreographer Merce Cunningham. The exhibition also brings together all six Between the Clock and the Bed paintings (1981–83)—improvisations on Edvard Munch’s self-portrait from 1940–43 that are an inspired example of the artist’s perpetual engagement with his predecessors.

Gagosian will publish a catalogue to accompany the exhibition that will feature essays by noted American art critic Roberta Smith and Carlos Basualdo, the cocurator of Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, a two-part lifetime retrospective held simultaneously at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 2021–22.