Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2024. India ink and watercolor over etching on paper. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.
Jasper Johns has never been shy about tinkering with his storied legacy and now, seven decades in, he’s still at it.
Jasper Johns: Recent Drawings opens November 5 at Matthew Marks Gallery in Chelsea. It includes a dozen drawings committed over the past two years that dig into the legendary artist’s past, drawing inspiration anew from diverse sources including his 1986 series The Seasons, a Rubin’s vase, the sign language alphabet and Picasso.
That Johns would be reinventing himself even now is not all that surprising for an artist who painted Flag in 1954-55, then revisited the image more than 100 times in paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures. He painted Target with Plaster Casts in 1955, then hit the same subject more 50 other times.
Fifteen years ago, Johns created a small image using Shrinky Dinks, a plastic material made for children to draw on that shrinks approximately 60 percent when heated. That image is repurposed across the top of eight of the drawings included in the Matthew Marks exhibition.
In Untitled (2024), an India ink and watercolor over etching, eight tiny figures on backgrounds of red, gold and blue are arrayed across the top above two profiles facing each other across a dark field ghosted with the alphabet. The figure on the left is distracted by a perplexed figure contemplating colored stars, the right figure is occupied by colored shapes. The subject of this face-off is a small inset drawing.
In three other drawings, Johns creates a memento mori, taking images from The Seasons and replacing his shadow with a skeleton holding a skull. References to death have long been part of Johns’ lexicon. “Smiling skeletons, sinister skulls… a constellation of elegiac subjects that face us with intransigence and difficulty,” art historian Michael Ann Holly has written of Johns’s work.
Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2018. Oil on canvas. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.
That Johns would place a skeleton on top of his shadow is also a return to earlier themes. In Untitled (2018), a grinning skeleton in a small hat stands inside the dark silhouette of his body — ribs, pelvis and skull drawn over the shadow, flanked by brick, crosshatching, newspaper and the three stick figures with brushes.
A shadow proves a body is present, blocking the light. A skeleton is what remains when the body is gone. By imposing one atop the other, is Johns revising the terms of his own presence—preserving the structure, but changing the context of the issue?
The Matthew Marks show comes as Johns is proving himself to be one active nonagenarian. This year has seen Johns featured in Night Driver, the roughly 140-work retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; Between the Clock and the Bed, Gagosian and Castelli's crosshatch survey in New York; Flags at Craig Starr Gallery; and Copy/Trace at David Zwirner.
Jasper Johns in his studio, c. 1976–80 © 1991 Hans Namuth Estate Photo: Hans Namuth Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
“My experience of life is that it’s very fragmented; certain kinds of things happen, and in another place a different kind of thing occurs,” Johns has said. “I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences.”
Jasper Johns: Recent Drawings runs from November 5 through January 23 at Matthew Marks Gallery, 526 West 22nd Street, Chelsea.
