Untitled (Painting of a Man Leaving in Boat)

2010 - Painting (Painting)

Chris Johanson

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

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. An orange-haired figure, oar positioned in mid-stroke, looks ahead—whether toward an edge or an infinite expanse, it is impossible to tell. Echoing a trope that recurs in Greek epic poetry, transcendental painting, and current-day reality television, the character is alone with nature. We witness—and likely empathize with—his voyage.


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
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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)
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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...

Forest Gathering N.2
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Gregory Crewdson

2005

Forest Gathering N.2 is part of the series of photographs Beneath the Roses (2003-2005) where anonymous townscapes, forest clearings and broad, desolate streets are revealed as sites of mystery and wonder; similarly, ostensibly banal interiors become the staging grounds for strange human scenarios...

Execution Changes #22
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Julian Hoeber

2011

Every work in Hoeber’s 2011 series Execution Changes is titled in alphanumeric code...

Collapse
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Will Rogan

2007

Shot in the streets of Tokyo, Collapse , is a meditation on the passing of time and on the complicated way in which we are smashed between the past and the future...

Ammo Bunker
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Mario Ybarra Jr.

2009

Ammo Bunker (2009) is a multipart installation that includes large-scale wall prints and an architectural model...

Enemy’s Enemy: A Monument To A Monument
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Tuan Andrew Nguyen

2012

This work presents the image of an immolated monk engraved on a baseball bat...

Paper Tigers…from a whisper to a scream
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Juan Capistran

2012

The 10 $1 bills that make up From a Whisper to a Scream (2012) read like instructions in origami...

Stowe
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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 (Governor of Ohio Judson Harmon), Damaged series
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Lisa Oppenheim

2003

The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...

Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (Immigration Reform Now) and We Are Immigrants Not Terrorists
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Andrea Bowers

2010

The small drawings that comprise Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (Immigration Reform Now) and We Are Immigrants Not Terrorists are based on photographs taken at a political rally in downtown Los Angeles in which thousands of individuals demonstrated for immigrants’ rights...

Untitled (Pasta Painting)
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Scott Reeder

2013

Reeder’s works often start with language—and his Pasta Paintings are no different...

White Minority
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Juan Capistran

2005

White Minority , is typical of Capistran’s sampling of high art genres and living subcultures in which the artist subsumes an object’s high art pedigree within a vernacular art form...

Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road
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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...

Human Quarry
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Leslie Shows

Human Quarry is a large work on paper by Leslie Shows made of a combination of acrylic paint and collage...

Diego Rivera Mural: Billionaires Club; Ministry of Education, Mexico D.F., Third Gallery
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Tina Modotti

1927

Modotti’s Diego Rivera Mural: Billionaires Club; Ministry of Education, Mexico D...

Untitled (Butterfly)
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Mark Grotjahn

2002

This particular drawing, like many of Grotjahn’s works, presents a decentered single-point perspective...

Untitled (Sten-Frenke House #04)
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Luisa Lambri

2007

Custom-built for a silent film star in 1934 in Santa Monica, the Sten-Frenke House is an idiosyncratic icon...

Tapitapultas
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Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker

2012

In Tapitapultas (2012), Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker comment on mass consumerism and pollution by way of a game they invented...