Erick Johnson:
Streets for Evermore
On view February 27 through March 26, 2016
gallery neptune & brown is pleased to announce Streets for Evermore, a solo exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by New York based artist, Erick Johnson. This will be Johnson’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Streets for Evermore is derived from Johnson’s primary experience with the urban environment. Taking serendipitous urban moments as a philosophical starting point, Johnson then creates works of balance and tension that converse with the history of geometric abstraction. While urban constructions can fall into monotony, Johnson invites us into a world of saturated hues: stacked, abutted, connected, and interrupted, suggesting a drawn battle between flatness & painterly space.
Johnson's work demonstrates that our post-industrial and post-humanist world has deep roots in the past. In his words, abstraction as a practice, “is an unbroken continuum that goes back to the beginnings of human culture and beyond, to the patterns of nature.” Johnson’s work draws from this past, while updating a long tradition.
Johnson was born in 1959 in San Francisco. Based in New York City, he received an MFA from Bard College in 2005 and has shown publicly for more than twenty years both in the United States and abroad. Colorvane, an important recent exhibition was exhibited at Indiana University’s IUCA+D design center in Columbus, Indiana in September 2015. Streets for Evermore will showcase new oil on canvas works, as well as charcoal and gouache on paper.