"I had gotten sober in 2014 and I started making [the Broken Men
series] in 2015 as a response to living in a world that I didn't know
how to live in without drugs and alcohol. That was paralleled by the
killing of Mike Brown, Donald Trump running for president and the
global refugee crisis [...] I felt like my eyes had just opened [...] A
lot of my work is dealing with historical narratives and the
autobiographic: What's my story? How does it fit into these historical
narratives? I was making a project that was quite timeless in a sense.
But the work, upon me becoming sober, started to look at the world that
we were living in at the time. It was really kind of a shock. There was
no more buffer. I had no escape tool, I didn't have the fluid that I
had used to perform my escape. And so the work started showing a
different urgency by speaking to time in a way that it hadn't so much
prior. " - Rashid Johnson
Rashid Johnson came to prominence in the art world with his Anxious Men series of paintings. What better show to go visit then (in the period between the original lockdown and the current lockdown 2.0), in a year full of high anxiety, than Johnson's latest show Waves at Hauser & Wirth. Waves features Johnson's new Broken Crowd series of works in the first of the gallery spaces, which examine states of toxic masculinity in certain contemporary males. These works are huge paintings of block-headed figures. The size and colour of these paintings certainly make an impact within the gallery space. They are busy, collaged compositions, consisting of overpainted ceramic tiles, cracked mirrors and shaped, branded, wooden inserts. As a result the reflective surfaces of these works seems to shimmer and dazzle. Perhaps these fractured surfaces are meant to be a reflection of, or glimpses of the psyche, and the stress and anxiety that these figures are feeling. Johnson's iconography and elements of his technique reminded me of that of Jean-Michel Basquiat (previously on this blog here), but these figures seemed to be more constrained, being confined within uniform, grid-like constructions on the surface of the paintings.
"Johnson updates the visual language of his long-established Anxious Men
in new works as part of his Anxious Red Paintings series, which began as
drawings made during and in reaction to the global lockdown, leading
Johnson to produce expansive oil paintings. Using oil on linen and a
blood red medium for the first time to depict the deceptively crude
archetypal faces, Johnson has captured the ‘life and death’ urgency that
has separated and connected communities around the globe. This red
pigment, entitled Anxious Red, was created specially by Johnson for
these paintings. The opacity and slippery texture of the medium itself
brings a mobility to the works: a nod to the importance of movement and
gesture within Johnson’s oeuvre. Just as Johnson selects his typical
materials and tools – such as shea butter and black soap – for the
importance of their historical narratives, here he has chosen to use the
canonically significant, and universally recognisable, medium of oil
paint in order to communicate his message all the more urgently. As
Johnson himself says, ‘this body of works does not hide from its
ambition to be understood’. As such, his Anxious Red Paintings can be
read as history paintings for our times." - Hauser & Wirth.
Modern furniture designs from his Papillon range by Tom Faulkner. They were inspired by the observation of mass butterfly migration on visits to north America, and the structural patterns found in their wings.
Polly Morgan: How to Behave at Home, installation view
I made a first visit to the Bomb Factory Art Foundation to see these sinuous, serpentine sculptures with a range of highly tactile surfaces, in this exhibition by sculptor Polly Morgan. Though usually known for the use of taxidermy in her work, appearances here are deceptive, as the snakes exhibited here are polyurethane replicas which still look startlingly real. The concrete blocks and polystyrene packaging blocks which house the writhing, knotted bodies of the serpents are also not quite what they seem to be. The contrasting shiny and hard surface textures, as well as the natural and artificial nature of the materials and subjects makes for some very interesting juxtapositions. The large-scale photographs of Morgan's hands with ubiquitous decorative fake nails flaying actual snakes to reveal the tender flesh underneath are strangely visceral and erotically charged.
