Mitchell Johnson is exhibiting seven large-scale work within the foyer of the San Francisco skyscraper 425 Market Road from March 17 to Could 30. Works embody “Trinity East (Iceberg)” (2020–2024), 78×120 inches, made after a 2018 journey to Newfoundland, in addition to three work of Johnson’s ongoing muse, the Presidio Park, with its peculiar, still-life-like assortment of buildings.
“Buoys (Rosenquist)” (2025), 120 x 78 inches, oil on canvas (© Mitchell Johnson, 2025)
In interviews and essays, Johnson has constantly remarked on what seeing a Josef Albers/Giorgio Morandi exhibition in Bologna, Italy, in 2005 meant for his apply. That viewing cemented his change from a brushy, impressionistic paint software in the direction of a extra geometrically minded strategy to composition and shade. The brand new giant work on this exhibit mix the geometric and shade issues with a return to a painterly floor.
Brenda Danilowitz from the Josef & Annie Albers Basis commented on the impression of Albers and Morandi on Johnson’s work:
“About halfway into Mitchell Johnson’s 2014 monograph Color as Content there’s a portfolio of Josef Albers and Giorgio Morandi paintings juxtaposed one to a page – looking at each other, so to speak. The images are not accompanied by words, but they speak eloquently of Johnson’s admiration of and debt to these two quiet yet lofty twentieth century masters. Albers shows his mastery of color, space, and form. Morandi answers with form, space and color. No words needed. In 2005 Johnson had come across an Albers exhibition in Morandi’s eponymous museum in Bologna and recognized that something remarkable occurred when these two unlikely comrades in art faced one another. The upshot resonates in Mitchell Johnson’s work of the past two decades: precisely and meticulously arranged color and form play off each other in startling and lambent ways.”
In a 2025 Whitehot Journal article, Donald Kuspit writes in regards to the Morandi/Albers affect:
“Morandi and Albers are Johnson’s role models or mentors. To my mind’s eye they are phenomenologists par excellence, which is what Johnson is at his best—as in these paintings–aspires to be, however unwittingly. According to the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, in the Phenomenology of Perception, “Phenomenology is a transcendental philosophy which places in abeyance the assertions arising out of the natural attitude, but it is also a philosophy for which the world is ‘already there.’ It is painstaking…in its attentiveness and wonder, its demand for awareness.” Because the thinker John Cogan writes, in The Phenomenological Discount, “There is an experience in which it is possible for us to come to the world with no knowledge or preconceptions in hand; it is the experience of astonishment…in the experience of astonishment, our everyday ‘knowing,’ when compared to the knowing that we experience in astonishment, is shown up as a pale epistemological imposter.” At their greatest, once they [Johnson’s paintings] have a sort of parsimonious aesthetic depth and nuanced exactitude, and now not register because the “belief-performance of our customary life in the world,” they’re astonishing masterpieces of phenomenological notion, fraught with what the thinker George Santayana calls “hushed reverberations.”
Johnson’s work are within the everlasting collections of over 35 museums. In Could, his smaller work might be on view at Galerie Mercier in Paris, and in June, his work might be included in group exhibits on the Glass Home in New Canaan, Connecticut, and on the Cape Cod Museum of Artwork in Dennis, Masachussetts.
“Trinity East Iceberg (Newfoundland)” (2020-2024), 78 x 120 inches, oil on canvas (© Mitchell Johnson, 2025)
