RASHID JOHNSON
Rashid Johnson’s upcoming exhibition ‘Sodade’ takes over the entire exhibition galleries at Hauser & Wirth Menorca in the sensitively repurposed outbuildings of an 18th century naval hospital. For his first solo exhibition in Spain, the renowned contemporary American artist continues to work with a complex range of iconographies to explore collective and historical expressions of longing and displacement, while speaking to the times we live in.
Born in Chicago in 1977, Rashid Johnson is among an influential cadre of contemporary American artists whose work employs a wide range of media to explore themes of art history, individual and shared cultural identities, personal narratives, literature, philosophy, materiality, and critical history. After studying in the photography department of the Art Institute of Chicago, Johnson’s practice quickly expanded to embrace a wide range of media – including sculpture, painting, drawing, filmmaking, and installation.
‘Sodade’ is the title of a Cape Verdean song from 1950s, popularized by Cesária Évora, that narrates a profound emotional state of longing on ‘the long way’ to São Tomé. Originating in the Portuguese ‘saudade’, the term suggests a feeling of melancholy and missing, and becomes hybridized in the Cape Verdean use with a shift in the spelling. In ‘Sodade’, Johnson continues to draw from critical history and narratives around migration and journeys, with a similar gesture of hybridization.
The newly developed series of Seascape Paintings and boat sculptures draw from historical narratives of migration and journeys. The artist radically engages with the surface of the canvases with a process of removal similar to that of early works such as Cosmic Slops, in which Johnson carved marks into black soap and wax. For the Seascape Paintings, painted canvases are coated completely with Neutral White or Prussian Blue oil paint which Johnson wipes away and scratches with shapes reminiscent of individual rowboats. The repetition of the motif and their scale suggest the possibility to escape, as well as of isolation, longing and drifting at sea.
visuals courtesy of Rashid Johnson
In ‘Sodade’, Rashid Johnson continues to incorporate diverse materials rich with symbolism and personal history, exploring collective narratives of longing and migration while providing a poignant sense of history now.
