I am Human, Abstract Foil, No Humans IV

2004 - Painting (Painting)

Chris Johanson

location: Los Angeles, California
year born: 1968
gender: male
nationality: American
home town: San Jose, California

Chris Johanson’s paintings, sculptures, and installations break down everyday scenes and commonplace dramas into colorful forms; the darkest sides of humanity are invoked with humor. The works comment on subjects such as capitalism, consumerism, the art world, and therapy. The triptych I Am a Human, Abstract Foil, No Humans IV (2004) is a meditation on the cosmos. It consists of three small paintings: one of a man with a head of multicolored fragments ( I Am a Human ), one of an abstract rainbow-colored geometric form on foil ( Abstract Foil ), and one of what appears to be a brightly burning star or a representation of the Big Bang ( No Humans IV ). In a playful but serious manner, it envisions the evolution of the world and the creative forces at play in nature and humankind.


The prolific Chris Johanson produces paintings, zines, installations, and sculptures that are notable for their earnest, almost childlike abstraction. His work delves unabashedly into the emotional, social, and spiritual aspects of human nature, tracking points of commonality and difference using simple shapes and lines as well as an unflagging sense of magnanimous humor.


Colors:



Untitled
© » KADIST

Barry McGee

Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner...

Untitled (Bird and Eyes)
© » KADIST

Clare Rojas

2008

Rojas’s two pieces in the Kadist Collection— Untitled (four-legged…) and Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) —are representative of her pictorial style which uses bold colorful blocks of paint and female and animal characters...

Domes, #1
© » KADIST

Judy Chicago

1969

Domes #1 represents a significant moment in Chicago’s career when her art began to change from a New York-influenced Abstract Expressionist style to one that reflected the pop-inflected art being made in Los Angeles...

Herculine's Profecy
© » KADIST

Juliana Huxtable

2017

Herculine’s Prophecy by Juliana Huxtable features a kneeling demon-figure on what appears to be a screen-print, placed on a wooden table, which has then been photographed and digitally altered to appear like a book cover, with a title and subtitle across the top, and a poem written across the bottom...

Other related works, blended automatically  
» see more

Apartment on Cardboard
© » KADIST

Chris Johanson

2000

Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building...

Untitled
© » KADIST

Barry McGee

Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner...

Untitled (Bird and Eyes)
© » KADIST

Clare Rojas

2008

Rojas’s two pieces in the Kadist Collection— Untitled (four-legged…) and Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) —are representative of her pictorial style which uses bold colorful blocks of paint and female and animal characters...

Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road
© » KADIST

Lin Yilin

1995

For his action, Safely Maneuvering across Lin He Road , Lin built a brick wall on one side of a busy main street in the city of Guangzhou...

Related works sharing similar palette  
» see more

Letters I Never Wrote: The Political Murders
© » KADIST

Jinoos Taghizadeh

2008

Letter I Never Wrote is one of the most powerful series of Jinoos Taghizadeh...

A Billionaire Art Collector Is Commissioning a $1.5 Million Diamond-Studded Face Mask - via artnet news
© » LARRY'S LIST

The 18-carat gold, diamond-encrusted mask is being made by Israeli jewelry company Yvel and is expected to be delivered by December....

Julie Mehretu’s Masterpiece Breaks Records at Sotheby’s
© » ART CENTRON

Julie Mehretu's Masterpiece Breaks Records at Sotheby's - Artcentron Home » Julie Mehretu’s Masterpiece Breaks Records at Sotheby’s ART AUCTION Dec 11, 2023 Ξ Leave a comment Julie Mehretu’s Masterpiece Breaks Records at Sotheby’s posted by ARTCENTRON Julie Mehretu’s Masterpiece, Walkers With the Dawn and Morning sets a new record at auction...

PACIFIC LIMN
© » KADIST

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES

2013

Pacific Limn weaves together three narratives that comment on hyper-capitalism pan-Pacific cities that San Francisco exemplifies...

Related works from the » 2000's created around » Los Angeles, California  
» see more

Undocumented Intervention
© » KADIST

Julio Cesar Morales

2006

Julio Cesar Morales’s watercolor drawings, Undocumented Intervention , show a variety of surprising hiding places assumed by people trying to cross into the United States without documentation...

Untitled
© » KADIST

Jedediah Caesar

2009

For Untitled, Caesar encased recycled objects such as scraps of plywood, paper or cloth in resin and then cut and reassembled the pieces into abstract forms...

The End One
© » KADIST

Raymond Pettibon

2005

The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...

Untitled (Schindler House, #01)
© » KADIST

Luisa Lambri

2007

Rudolph Schindler’s designs, part of a practice he called “Space Architecture,” marry interior with exterior and space with light...

Other works by: » Chris Johanson  
» see more

Apartment on Cardboard
© » KADIST

Chris Johanson

2000

Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building...

Untitled (Painting of a Man Leaving in Boat)
© » KADIST

Chris Johanson

2010

Chris Johanson’s Untitled (Painting of a Man Leaving in Boat) (2010) pictures a canoe drifting toward an off-kilter horizon line, which demarcates the cobalt sea from the cerulean sky...

Eclipse
© » KADIST

Jordan Kantor

2009

Eclipse is a series of screenprints from Jordan Kantor’s larger vitrine installation that included reworkings of a single image of a small group viewing an eclipse through shielding cut-outs...

Reborn
© » KADIST

Desiree Holman

2010

Reborn, 2010 is a three-channel video by Desiree Holman that questions ideas of motherhood and the maternal instinct...

Lens Flare
© » KADIST

Jordan Kantor

2008

Lens Flare and the series Untitled Basel Lens Flare (6168, 5950, 7497) were part of a solo project by the artist presented at ArtBasel in 2009...

Victory at Sea
© » KADIST

Colter Jacobsen

2007

Victory at Sea is a simple mechanism made from cardboard and found materials that mimics the Phenakistoscope, an early cinematic apparatus...

Related works found in the same semantic group  
» see more

Stowe
© » KADIST

James Welling

2006

Welling employs simple materials like crumpled aluminum foil, wrinkled fabric and pastry dough and directly exposes them as photograms, playing with the image in the process of revealing it...

Untitled (History painting)
© » KADIST

Korakrit Arunanondchai

2017

His untitled paintings express his concern regarding perception in abstract form...

There are veins in these lands, I
© » KADIST

Rodney McMillian

2013

In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point...

Swipe
© » KADIST

Eileen Quinlan

2016

Eileen Quinlan’s abstracted images, like Swipe , rely on the manipulation of photographic materials inside the studio itself, and reject the exterior world for complex interrogations of the medium....