Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to announce an upcoming exhibition of “Chroma Chord” - new paintings by Erick Johnson. This is Johnson’s first exhibition with the gallery.
Johnson’s paintings subvert conventional ideas of geometric abstraction. They consist of a grid of irregularly shaped polygons - straight-edged, to be sure, but each one is eccentric in shape and tells its own color story. Sometimes color is clear and bright, sometimes color is more discreet. But always paint is sanded and scraped with a myriad of instruments as opaque stripes flutter over translucent color creating shapes with unique painterly rhythms.
As Hovey Brock said in the Brooklyn Rail about Johnson’s work, “Johnson is above all a colorist, and the way he bends the hues of his glazed tints like the notes in a blues guitarist’s solo shows mastery.”
It is the juxtaposition of these eccentric shapes, and their combination of color that - in each of these new paintings - creates its own larger story of energy and dynamism. Jazzy combinations of shapes and colors often seem to collide and push. Other times they seem relaxed together in a comfortable intimacy. But always shapes press against the picture plane creating a tense standoff. Johnson says “In this way, I investigate how relationships of rhythm, form, and color can convey lived experience.”
Born in 1959 in San Francisco, Johnson received his MFA from Bard College in 2005 and has shown publicly for more than twenty years in the United States and abroad, including the Labspace Gallery in Hillsdale, NY, and Geoffrey Young Gallery in Great Barrington, MA. He has had solo exhibitions at Heskin Contemporary Gallery in New York, Gallery, and Neptune and Brown in Washington DC. He has had residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and in 2021 had a solo exhibition at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center.
