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拍品专文
Three scrawled red rows of faces, their eyes wide and mouths haywire in a graphic state of emergency, return our gaze from Rashid Johnson’s Untitled Anxious Red Drawing (2020). The work is part of his ongoing ‘Anxious Men’ series, which reflect on the fundamental and interconnected traumas that course through contemporary society. It belongs to a group created in 2020 that were influenced by the crises of the coronavirus pandemic and the murder of George Floyd. Where the features of the earlier ‘Anxious Men’ had been scratched into layers of black soap and wax, these new drawings consisted of intense, immediate colour applied directly to white supports. Johnson worked with a paint manufacturer in upstate New York to develop oil sticks in a special shade of crimson, which he called ‘Anxious Red’. The present work’s frenetic, tangled red lines charge the image with visceral urgency.
A major survey of Johnson’s work, Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers, will open at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in April 2025. One of the most prominent artists working today, Johnson first made a splash in 2001 as an innovative photographer. He has since developed a complex mixed-media practice, engaging with aspects of African-American intellectual history, collective identity and experience. He has assembled structures of piled-up books, tropical plants, shea butter and record covers; he has scorched wooden floorboards, cast metal sculptures and made colourful, glittering mosaics. During the pandemic—working in solitude at home, away from his studio—he began to experiment with painting and drawing. ‘For many years, I’d found ways to make marks and paintings without using traditional means’, he said. ‘… But I was always a painter, in a way, and now I saw how accessible and direct and immediate traditional painting was’ (R. Johnson quoted in C. Tomkins, ‘The Confident Anxiety of Rashid Johnson’, The New Yorker, 9 December 2024).
Johnson’s ‘Anxious Men’ series started with a group of single figures, their features incised into splashes of black soap and wax on ceramic tiling, that were debuted at the Drawing Center in New York in late 2015. He had conceived of these characters as spectators to a time when high-profile cases of police brutality against Black men were rocking the United States. He soon began to multiply the nervy faces into grids that he called ‘Anxious Audiences’. ‘I was a new father who was going to have to explain to his son the complexities of America’s issue with race’, he said. ‘In a lot of ways, those paintings were a catharsis’ (R. Johnson, ibid.). These concerns took on fresh relevance during the tumult of 2020. In the present work, the faces’ features are linked through Johnson’s looping, cursive line, speaking of a state of tension that was common to people across the world at the time. If social distancing kept us apart, we were in some ways connected: no one was alone in their anxiety. Untitled Anxious Red Drawing is an electric picture of the vulnerability and strength of shared experience.
A major survey of Johnson’s work, Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers, will open at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in April 2025. One of the most prominent artists working today, Johnson first made a splash in 2001 as an innovative photographer. He has since developed a complex mixed-media practice, engaging with aspects of African-American intellectual history, collective identity and experience. He has assembled structures of piled-up books, tropical plants, shea butter and record covers; he has scorched wooden floorboards, cast metal sculptures and made colourful, glittering mosaics. During the pandemic—working in solitude at home, away from his studio—he began to experiment with painting and drawing. ‘For many years, I’d found ways to make marks and paintings without using traditional means’, he said. ‘… But I was always a painter, in a way, and now I saw how accessible and direct and immediate traditional painting was’ (R. Johnson quoted in C. Tomkins, ‘The Confident Anxiety of Rashid Johnson’, The New Yorker, 9 December 2024).
Johnson’s ‘Anxious Men’ series started with a group of single figures, their features incised into splashes of black soap and wax on ceramic tiling, that were debuted at the Drawing Center in New York in late 2015. He had conceived of these characters as spectators to a time when high-profile cases of police brutality against Black men were rocking the United States. He soon began to multiply the nervy faces into grids that he called ‘Anxious Audiences’. ‘I was a new father who was going to have to explain to his son the complexities of America’s issue with race’, he said. ‘In a lot of ways, those paintings were a catharsis’ (R. Johnson, ibid.). These concerns took on fresh relevance during the tumult of 2020. In the present work, the faces’ features are linked through Johnson’s looping, cursive line, speaking of a state of tension that was common to people across the world at the time. If social distancing kept us apart, we were in some ways connected: no one was alone in their anxiety. Untitled Anxious Red Drawing is an electric picture of the vulnerability and strength of shared experience.