TRIBUTE: Rashid Johnson-Seven Rooms and a Garden
Rashid Johnson is recognized as one of the major voices of his generation, an artist who composes searing meditations on race and class while establishing an organic formal vocabulary that fuses a variety of sculptural and painterly traditions. his paintings, sculptures, films, performances and photographs, he draws from his own biography, as well as numerous art and cultural histories, to reflect on the human condition at a time of great upheaval.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Moderna Museet Archive
In the exhibition “Seven Rooms and a Garden”, the work of American artist and filmmaker Rashid Johnson is in conversation, confrontation and at times collusion with the collection of Moderna Museet. Each room in the exhibition – and a garden – stages an encounter based on the personal, political and art historical relationships that unfold in his practice. “Seven Rooms and a Garden” is the third chapter of the museum’s new collection display where artworks from Moderna Museet’s collection are presented in three larger shifting thematic exhibitions. Together the exhibitions plumb the depths of a variety of narratives from art history, replacing the earlier chronological format. Over time, the audience will thus encounter more works from Moderna Museet’s collection, one of the foremost of modern and contemporary art in Europe. For Rashid Johnson, abstraction is a source of life. In his “Bruise” paintings or the more recent “God” series, both of which are included in the exhibition, the abstract painterly mark is an expression of a spiritual or psychological journey. His monumental installation “Home” (2023), made especially for this exhibition, is an abstract self-portrait that uses shea butter sculptures, books and the growth of plant life to lend form to Black intellectual and cultural histories. Or the abstract gesture occurs through subtle interventions, from rearranging the architecture of Moderna Museet to introducing images, sounds and scenographies that reset how we experience the space of art and the museum. In all the works and interventions in the exhibition, Johnson explores the gesture of abstraction as an art historical lineage, a political necessity or a personal appeal. The space of the home is an important source of inspiration for Johnson, and serves as a model for the exhibition. Johnson says: “I’ve always been interested in the domestic. And kind of hijacking things that we’re familiar with and essentially occupying them”. His recent film “Black and Blue” (2021), which features prominently in the exhibition, is a case in point. Mainly situated in the artist’s home, the work depicts the life of the protagonist, played by Johnson himself, as he goes through his daily routines of eating, driving, exercising, spending time with his family and sleeping. A tension is felt in Black and Blue between what is public and private, what is familiar and unknown, what is expected and what actually occurs. In this unconventional self-portrait, Johnson returns the gaze to the intimate endeavours of being human. The audience will meet Rashid Johnson through nearly hundred works by over forty artists, including: Louis Armstrong, Louise Bourgeois, Tony Cokes, John Coltrane, De La Soul, Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Fosso, Marcia Hafif, David Hammons, On Kawara, Sol LeWitt, Klara Lidén, Lee Lozano, Ernest Mancoba, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Maia Cruz Palileo, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Melissa Shook, Salman Toor, Cy Twombly, Stanley Whitney and Frank Zappa. The artist’s home in “Black and Blue” is expanded in the exhibition to seven rooms and a garden – an interior of Rashid Johnson’s practice, with artists in Moderna Museet’s collection as likely and unlikely inhabitants.
Photo: Rashid Johnson, Home, 2023 Photo: Mattias Lindbäck/Moderna Museet, © Rashid Johnson
Info: Curator: Hendrik Folkerts, Moderna Museet, Exercisplan 4, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Sweeden, Duration: 30/9/2023-8/9/2024, Days & Hours: Tue & Fri 10:00-20:00, Wed-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.modernamuseet.se/stockholm/
