Bay Area Artist Mitchell Johnson exhibits 35 paintings at 229 Hamilton Avenue in Palo Alto, California, a 3,000 square foot gallery formerly occupied by Pace Palo Alto. The gallery is open daily from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. (PT) until Thursday, August 3.
Palo Alto played an important role in Johnson’s life and career. He moved there from New York to work for Sam Francis and has since had many exhibitions in the city, but never an exhibition of this magnitude. This exhibition, It takes time, includes 15 large paintings that Johnson focused on from 2019 to 2023. It’s an eclectic show featuring icebergs, boats, lifeguard stands and views of San Francisco, New York. England and New York. The common thread is the concern for colors; Johnson frequently works on paintings for months or even years, carefully adjusting and tweaking color relationships in an effort to achieve a unique and unexpected commentary on our daily surroundings. A selection of earlier small paintings are included to contextualize his 40-year career.
Mitchell Johnson moved to Palo Alto, California in 1990 shortly after completing his MFA at Parsons School of Design in New York. He spent the 1990s wandering between California, New York and Europe creating scrub landscapes and figure paintings. In the 2000s, repeated trips to the Danish island of Bornholm and a chance visit to a Josef Albers/Giorgio Morandi exhibition in Bologna led to a decisive change in approach. Johnson turned to a more consciously curated picture plane, where larger forms are meant to act as scaffolding to comment on the tension between artificial color and natural color. The earth and clouds became clusters of carefully observed, but also carefully arranged, rooftops and cottages. Quilts from Tuscan fields have become water towers, picnic tables and chairs.
Johnson’s apparent receptivity to the paintings’ own demands was noted by writer Chris Busa in a 2012 Provincetown Arts article:
While many of Johnson’s paintings are titled after the places that inspired them, such places do not actually exist. Each is a collage of compressed intimacies spread out over the months it takes to paint them. He did what Edwin Dickinson called “First Shot”, in which a painting is completed on the outside in one shot. Yet his typical practice is to keep a painting for several months or more in the studio, to see if a painting stands the test of repeated gaze, often involving the process of memory revision, where a succession of ‘impressions acquired over weeks or months is expressed in a continuous stream.
Donald Kuspit recently wrote:
Like all of Johnson’s works, a latent conflict is embedded in the scene, in the form of often stark contrasts of space and form. Strange as it may sound, they are implicitly psychodramas disguised as physical drama. I argue that they have an emotional edge, which makes them more than factually descriptive and ingeniously abstract.
Mitchell Johnson’s work is also included in Eternal springsa group exhibition curated by Alexander DiJulio at the Fireplace Project in East Hampton, New York, from July 22 to August 11.
For more information, visit mitchelljohnson.com and follow him on Instagram at @mitchell_johnson_artist.
