Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror

Sept 29, 2021–Feb 13, 2022

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Leo Castelli 1968

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At certain moments throughout his career, Jasper Johns has made and displayed groups of new paintings in ways that emphasize their relationships to one another and the spaces in which they were shown. The next gallery precisely re-creates one such exhibition, which he staged in 1968 at Leo Castelli Gallery in Manhattan. Johns filled the intimate townhouse gallery with a dramatic set piece of six paintings interconnected through shared imagery, processes, and a concern for architectural space.

Four of these works were made with the same silkscreen, in which a note indicates an image of a fork be reproduced at a scale of seven inches long, though it is actually printed at twice that length. This discrepancy foregrounds the space between reality and its representation, as well as the gaps between what we read, see, and believe. Other motifs, by contrast, appear at actual size, including rulers and window frames pressed directly on the canvases. Such elements play on the trope of painting as an illusionistic portal onto other realms, while also literally referencing the built environment, as do the flagstones Johns designed from his memory of a wall painted to look like stone. Throughout these works, airy color and open brushwork tense against rectangular borders and interior divisions, suggesting walls within canvases and sky within frames. As a whole, they form a carefully choreographed ensemble that points to their inner structural conditions and to those of the room that contains them.

The corresponding gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art re-creates Johns’s Leo Castelli exhibition from 1960.

  • Wide rectangular composition of four panels of different patterns, colors, and painterly textures.
    Wide rectangular composition of four panels of different patterns, colors, and painterly textures.

    Jasper Johns, Harlem Light, 1967. Oil and collage on canvas (four panels), 85 × 172 1/8 in. (215.9 × 437.2 cm) overall. Seattle Art Museum; partial and promised gift of Jon and Mary Shirley, in honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum 2002.67 © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, New York

  • Painting of white squares with blotches of color overlaid, against a pink border.
    Painting of white squares with blotches of color overlaid, against a pink border.

    Jasper Johns, Studio II, 1966. Oil on canvas, 70 1/2 × 125 3/8 in. (179.1 × 318.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of the family of Victor W. Ganz in his memory, 92.4. © 2021 Jasper Johns / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

  • Wide rectangular composition of three side-by-side panels of different painterly textures and patterns, mostly of gray and white with some injections of color and subtle embedded images and letters.
    Wide rectangular composition of three side-by-side panels of different painterly textures and patterns, mostly of gray and white with some injections of color and subtle embedded images and letters.

    Jasper Johns, Wall Piece, 1968. Oil and collage on canvas (three panels), 72 × 110 1/4 in. (182.9 × 280 cm). Collection of the artist; on long-term loan to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, New York

  • Tall rectangular composition of gray, white, and blue painterly brushstrokes, with the shadowy image of a fork and spoon suspended by string down the middle of the composition; inscription that runs vertically up the right side of the painting, pointing to the central image with two arrows, reads "FORK SHOULD BE 7" LONG".
    Tall rectangular composition of gray, white, and blue painterly brushstrokes, with the shadowy image of a fork and spoon suspended by string down the middle of the composition; inscription that runs vertically up the right side of the painting, pointing to the central image with two arrows, reads "FORK SHOULD BE 7" LONG".

    Jasper Johns, Screen Piece, 1967. Oil on canvas, 72 × 50 in. (182.9 × 127 cm). Private collection. © 2021 Jasper Johns / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph © The Wildenstein Plattner Institute, New York, 2021

  • Tall rectangular composition of gray, white, and blue painterly brushstrokes—with three shallow bars of red, yellow, and blue at the very top—with the shadowy image of a fork and spoon suspended by string down the middle of the composition; inscription that runs vertically up the right side of the painting, pointing to the central image with two arrows, reads "FORK SHOULD BE 7" LONG".
    Tall rectangular composition of gray, white, and blue painterly brushstrokes—with three shallow bars of red, yellow, and blue at the very top—with the shadowy image of a fork and spoon suspended by string down the middle of the composition; inscription that runs vertically up the right side of the painting, pointing to the central image with two arrows, reads "FORK SHOULD BE 7" LONG".

    Jasper Johns, Screen Piece 2, 1968. Oil on canvas, 72 × 50 in. (182.9 × 127 cm). Collection of Barbara and Richard S. Lane. © 2021 Jasper Johns / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph © The Wildenstein Plattner Institute, New York, 2021

  • Tall rectangular composition of gray, white, and blue painterly brushstrokes, with the shadowy image of a fork and spoon suspended by string down the middle of the composition; inscription that runs vertically up the right side of the painting, pointing to the central image with two arrows, reads "FORK SHOULD BE 7" LONG".
    Tall rectangular composition of gray, white, and blue painterly brushstrokes, with the shadowy image of a fork and spoon suspended by string down the middle of the composition; inscription that runs vertically up the right side of the painting, pointing to the central image with two arrows, reads "FORK SHOULD BE 7" LONG".

    Jasper Johns, Screen Piece 3 (The Sonnets), 1968. Oil on canvas, 72 × 50 in. (182.9 × 127 cm). Nerman Family Collection. © 2021 Jasper Johns / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics, Rockford, Illinois

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