ART-PREVIEW:Helen Johnson-Ends
Helen Johnson is perhaps best known for her large-scale, semi-narrative paintings, which explore a range of political and cultural histories and issues. Her diverse oeuvre switches between structured representational imagery and more intuitively conceived abstractions. At the heart of her practice lies a continual questioning of the perceived limitations of painting and an attendant desire to expand its potential, both conceptually and technically.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: New Museum Archive
Helen Johnson’s “Ends” at New Museum in New York, is the artist’s first exhibition in an American institution. For her presentation she produced a new series of paintings that extend her broader thematic concerns, while maintaining her experimental approach to the material and the communicative possibilities of painting as a critical medium. For over a decade, Helen Johnson has used painting as a tool to investigate issues around the legacy of colonialism, the construction of national identity, personal history, and contemporary politics in her native Australia. As the artist says “I have an interest in how painting might be used as a means of addressing and reflecting on aspects of cultural identity in an open way, which I might position against a declarative way. Painting is an interesting vehicle for me because it is loaded, neurotic, problematised, a market force, scattered, essentialised and recomplexified, loathed, able to operate simultaneously within and beyond itself, able to be beautiful and horrible at the same time”. Her densely layered canvases incorporate historical imagery ranging from political cartoons, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century painting, architectural diagrams and maps, fragments of bodies, and handwritten text rendered with a variety of painterly gestures. Often double-sided and scaled to the human body, Johnson’s works are arranged in carefully composed installations, positioning the viewer at the intersection of a broad range of cultural and historical influences. Although driven by a deep and rigorous process of historical research, her works adopt a playful and even humorous take on historical memory and ingrained social conventions.
Info: Curator: Gary Carrion-Murayari, 235 Bowery, New York, Duration: 13/9/17/14/1/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.newmuseum.org
