David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce a solo presentation of photo-based work by Larry Johnson from the 1980s and 90s for Art Basel OVR:20c. A VIP Preview will take place from Wednesday, October 28, 3:00 am PT / 12:00 pm CET through Thursday, October 30. Access is available by logging into ArtBasel.com with a designated VIP account. Art Basel OVR:20c will be available to all registered guests October 30 – 31, 2020.
Larry Johnson's graphically embellished color photographs have influenced an entire generation of artists who use photography not to "capture" images but to make pictures that reveal the underlying social strata of contemporary culture. Johnson's signature technique involves photographing his drawings and collages, then further manipulating each reproduction so that it represents an idiosyncratic amalgam of popular history, text-based narrative, graphic design, and class awareness. In doing so, his pictures not only map the physical and mental geographies of Los Angeles, but establish a broader critique of the ways in which culture defines itself. Johnson often looks to the production of cartoon illustration, for instance, as a way of channeling the repressed libidinal energies of Hollywood. He hijacks pre-existing cultural forms and bends—or queers—them according to his own ends, appropriating signs and symbols through a kind of camp-inflected haunting, all the while locating vulnerability and humor in some of the darkest recesses of the social landscape.
From the late-1980s through the 1990s, Johnson made many of his most iconic and far-reaching photographs. These include works like Untitled (Why Say High School?) (1994), which showcases his inimitable command of language and his sui generis combination of genres and techniques. A candy-striped optical backdrop holds space for a string of distorted text—a pithy and mordantly sly critique of class, power, and economic status. Johnson's ability to raid the culture for images, design strategies, and resonant histories is fully on view in Untitled (Heh, Heh) (1987), in which he uses a Paul Rand-inspired typeface and color scheme to render an activated block of text that alludes to some "off-screen" joke made at both the viewer's and the artist's expense. A work like Untitled (Morgan Camera and King O'Lawn) (1994), meanwhile, is a perfect distillation of Johnson's keen sense of the stratification of postwar America. Appropriating recognizable symbols from the Southern California visual landscape—the logos for the now-defunct Morgan Camera shop and King O'Lawn mower company—Johnson sets up a dialectic between representations of an urbane photographer and a suburban homeowner, raising questions about who controls the cultural domain. As Dave Hickey noted in a 1994 essay on Johnson, "[A] good deal of the uneasy frisson that accompanies our perception of [his] work derives from its covert, aggressive insistence that we acknowledge the darker pleasures of our common culture and humanity—and own up to our common difference."
In November 2020, the work of Larry Johnson (b. 1959, Long Beach, California) will be featured in Made in L.A. 2020: a version, the biennial exhibition at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Raven Row, London (2015); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2009); and Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver (1996). Recent group exhibitions include The Foundation of the Museum: MOCA's Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2019); Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2018); Récit d'un temps court, Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Geneva (2018); and In the Crack of the Dawn, POOL at Luma/Westbau, Zurich (2014). Johnson was included in the 1991 Whitney Biennial and the 1988 Venice Biennale. His work is in the permanent collections of many institutions, among them the Art Institute of Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He lives and works in Los Angeles.