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.
Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner...
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...
Ammo Bunker (2009) is a multipart installation that includes large-scale wall prints and an architectural model...
The 10 $1 bills that make up From a Whisper to a Scream (2012) read like instructions in origami...
Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building...
Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner...
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 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...
Letter I Never Wrote is one of the most powerful series of Jinoos Taghizadeh...
A Portrait Revisited: 1986, 2006 - Video interview with Roderick McNicol | LensCulture Video interview A Portrait Revisited: 1986, 2006 These diptych portraits of the same person, same pose, 20 years apart, evoke the magic that is at the heart of photography and portraiture—and a short, insightful video interview with the photographer reveals more about the process behind this powerful series...
Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants was created for the show Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life Part 1 , held at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute in 2008 and curated by McCarthy himself...
Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat...
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...
Walking Through is one of a series of videos—sometimes humorous, often absurd—that record the artist’s performative interactions with objects in a particular site...
Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building...
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...
Reborn, 2010 is a three-channel video by Desiree Holman that questions ideas of motherhood and the maternal instinct...
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...
The title Untitled Passport II was first used by Felix Gonzalez-Torres in an unlimited edition of small booklets, each containing sequenced photographs of a soaring bird against an open sky...
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...
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...
His untitled paintings express his concern regarding perception in abstract form...
Employing both the High Modernist technique of abstraction and monochronism, as in the work of Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein, and bodily states of fetishization, Yea High (sweetpreparator) reworks the art historical canon of movement and the body to consider flesh as a physical construction of man-made matter...
Cluster Illusion examines the brain’s tendency to recognize a pattern as something abstract...