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:



Other related works, blended automatically

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...

Execution Changes #22
© » KADIST

Julian Hoeber

2011

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

Tarantism
© » KADIST

Joachim Koester

2007

Tarantism is the name of disease which appeared in southern Italy, resulting from the bite of a spider called Tarantula...

Knight #6
© » KADIST

Karl Haendel

2011

Haendel’s series Knights (2011) is a set of impeccably drafted, nine-foot-tall pencil drawings depicting full suits of armor...

Untitled (Miller House, #02)
© » KADIST

Luisa Lambri

2002

Lambri’s careful framing in Untitled (Miller House, #02) redefines our understanding of this iconic mid-century modernist building located in Palm Springs, California...

Studio Construct 51
© » KADIST

Barbara Kasten

2008

Barbara Kasten’s Studio Construct 51 depicts an abstract still life: a greyscale photograph of clear translucent panes assembled into geometric forms, the hard lines of their edges converging and bisecting at various points...

Untitled (Pasta Painting)
© » KADIST

Scott Reeder

2013

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

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 (Butterfly)
© » KADIST

Mark Grotjahn

2002

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

Mother Pig, Shushi Gallery, San Diego Performance
© » KADIST

Paul McCarthy

1983

McCarthy’s Mother Pig performance at Shushi Gallery in 1983 was the first time he used a set, a practice which came to characterize his later works...

Human Quarry
© » KADIST

Leslie Shows

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

Untitled (Joseph T. Robinson Standing at a Podium in a Room), Damaged series
© » KADIST

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...

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...

Enemy’s Enemy: A Monument To A Monument
© » KADIST

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

2012

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