RAY JOHNSON
2017-07-24Johnson is one of the more eccentric figures in contemporary art. Born in Detroit in 1929, he attended the legendary Black Mountain College, where he met and befriended many of the leading avant-garde figures of the day. He moved to New York in 1949 and began exhibiting abstract paintings. Within a few years, however, he had rejected painting in favor of collage. That medium’s combinatory principles became central to his art, which grew to encompass performance, conceptual art, and sculpture. By the late 1950s his practice of mailing collages to friends and acquaintances had become a primary artistic focus, directly giving rise to the Mail Art movement.
Johnson’s collage works, which often incorporate celebrity images cut from magazines, are considered among the earliest examples of Pop art. He exhibited them at galleries and museums in the 1960s and 1970s, but starting in the late 1970s, with only a few exceptions, he stopped showing his work publicly. He never stopped working, however, and by 1995, when he committed suicide by jumping off a bridge, he had created an extraordinarily rich and varied body of work.
Opposite – Untitled (Dali/Dear David Smith/Barbra Streisand), 1974-94
Exhibition runs through to August 18th, 2017
Matthew Marks
523 West 24 Street
New York 10011
