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...

Ammo Bunker
© » KADIST

Mario Ybarra Jr.

2009

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

Paper Tigers…from a whisper to a scream
© » KADIST

Juan Capistran

2012

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

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...

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...

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....

Behave Like an Audience
© » KADIST

Brought together by a shared pleasure for late night conversations, Concert is a band consisting of artists whose visual practices often meld their penchant for music and their feeling for its potency...

A Portrait Revisited: 1986, 2006
© » LENS CULTURE

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...

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

Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants
© » KADIST

Paul McCarthy

2008

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)
© » KADIST

Edgar Arceneaux

2006

Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat...

White Minority
© » KADIST

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...

Walking Through
© » KADIST

Koki Tanaka

2009

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...

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...

Reborn
© » KADIST

Desiree Holman

2010

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

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...

Untitled (Untitled Passport II)
© » KADIST

Colter Jacobsen

2010

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
© » 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...

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...

Yea High (sweetpreparator)
© » KADIST

Shahryar Nashat

2015

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
© » KADIST

Melvin Moti

2015

Cluster Illusion examines the brain’s tendency to recognize a pattern as something abstract...