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Lot Essay
Layered, complex, and awash in history, Rashid Johnson’s Untitled Escape Collage is a symphony of materials that collaborate to create a mirror that the artist holds up to society. Across its highly active surface, Johnson incorporates disparate materials such as the African beauty staple black soap (a material he has also used in his portraits), ceramic and mirrored tiles, and wax, which he uses to adhere his objects to the support. Critic Roberta Smith observes that Johnson’s assemblages “create an Edenic mood…The works are completed (or elegantly defaced) with spray paint, scratchy daubs of black soap and big, velvety pours of the melted soap mixture” (R. Smith, “In ‘Fly Away,’ Rashid Johnson Keeps the Focus on Race,” New York Times, September 15, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/arts/design/in-fly-away-rashid-johnson-keeps-the-focus-on-race.html). The choice of black soap as a medium creates heretofore unimagined art historical innovations, while centering the objects of African and African American life within Johnson’s oeuvre.
“Making a painting using a thousand different cuts brings that paint to life. Inside of this exists maybe 300 abstract micro-paintings.” - Rashid Johnson
What results is a layered, textural assemblage that embodies the European avant-gardes of Dada and Situationist International, but also the pioneering work of Black artists, like the Gee’s Bend Quilters, Faith Ringgold, and Robert Colescott. Johnson, always unafraid to bare his soul to the viewer, offers an interwoven narrative with Untitled Escape Collage, and invites us to consider under what conditions we might need to escape. Of course, that query has everything to do with racial, gendered, and socioeconomic disparities. Johnson’s work has always been a source of empowerment and social justice, qualities that become even more powerful through the artist’s combination of abstraction and figuration.
Peppered with photographic reproductions of indigenous masks, Untitled Escape Collage celebrates Black history and creativity. Johnson moves seamlessly between the masks and the Ellsworth Kelly-like planar abstractions, reminding us that identity is both legible and opaque. Like Kelly’s series of Parisian windows, Untitled Escape Collage is a sumptuous, kaleidoscopic map of colors that refers to the natural world and transcends it. Johnson describes his approach to painting, “I think about most things that I make as quite topographic. So you imagine a landscape, the different materials in it, then just begin to translate them. Making a painting using a thousand different cuts brings that paint to life. Inside of this exists maybe 300 abstract micro-paintings. And then stepping back, just one large macro” (R. Johnson, quoted in M. Veitch, “Artist Rashid Johnson Isn’t the Plant-Parenting Type,” Interview Magazine, November 15, 2019, https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/rashid-johnson-hauser-and-wirth-exhibition-the-hikers). This micro-macro interplay is very present in Untitled Escape Collage, which invites detailed inspection even as it aims to be immersive and sublime. Of special note is vibrancy here; Johnson’s work is often spare, but Untitled Escape Collage is filled with color, notably an affecting purple. It reminds one Wassily Kandinsky’s fantastical paintings.
The Escape Collage series, like much of Johnson’s work, has autobiographical roots. Johnson recalls of his childhood in Chicago, “As a kid I remember thinking that if you could actually live in a place with palm trees, if you could get away from the city and the cold, that meant you’d definitely made it” (“Rashid Johnson,” Milwaukee Art Museum, 2017, https://mam.org/exhibitions/details/rashid-johnson/). The present work is therefore an act of longing and optimism, even when the dream of the so-called good life is off the table for so many families. Like an altar, Untitled Escape Collage gathers disparate parts together in an effort to create a new and gentler world. Relatedly, Johnson collaborated with the poet Robin Coste Lewis by providing another Escape Collage to illustrate her poem in The New York Times. Lewis writes, “Now our days/will be out of doors, instead/of inside them; our future will lie/with petals, caterpillars, well-dressed/moss, hypnotic snails, clapping/orange frogs that know to climb/which tree for the ripest alligator/pear. Every ocean has known us/Mother says, no shore is insignificant” (R.C. Lewis, “A Picture and a Poem: An Artist and a Poet Contemplate Freedom,” The New York Times, February 15, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/t-magazine/art/rashid-johnson-robin-coste-lewis-art-poem.html). Lewis could be describing the world of the present work, with its promise of new landscapes to explore, filled with amazing flora and fauna.
With the emotionally replete Untitled Escape Collage, Johnson revels in juxtapositions—between materials, and between the cold memories and warm dreams of his childhood. The uniting factor, as has always been the case in his oeuvre, is paint, which Johnson uses as a means of bringing histories together. He does not give us a sense of where we could escape to through his assemblages. Rather, he leaves it up to us to imagine new utopias in which we might find refuge.
“Making a painting using a thousand different cuts brings that paint to life. Inside of this exists maybe 300 abstract micro-paintings.” - Rashid Johnson
What results is a layered, textural assemblage that embodies the European avant-gardes of Dada and Situationist International, but also the pioneering work of Black artists, like the Gee’s Bend Quilters, Faith Ringgold, and Robert Colescott. Johnson, always unafraid to bare his soul to the viewer, offers an interwoven narrative with Untitled Escape Collage, and invites us to consider under what conditions we might need to escape. Of course, that query has everything to do with racial, gendered, and socioeconomic disparities. Johnson’s work has always been a source of empowerment and social justice, qualities that become even more powerful through the artist’s combination of abstraction and figuration.
Peppered with photographic reproductions of indigenous masks, Untitled Escape Collage celebrates Black history and creativity. Johnson moves seamlessly between the masks and the Ellsworth Kelly-like planar abstractions, reminding us that identity is both legible and opaque. Like Kelly’s series of Parisian windows, Untitled Escape Collage is a sumptuous, kaleidoscopic map of colors that refers to the natural world and transcends it. Johnson describes his approach to painting, “I think about most things that I make as quite topographic. So you imagine a landscape, the different materials in it, then just begin to translate them. Making a painting using a thousand different cuts brings that paint to life. Inside of this exists maybe 300 abstract micro-paintings. And then stepping back, just one large macro” (R. Johnson, quoted in M. Veitch, “Artist Rashid Johnson Isn’t the Plant-Parenting Type,” Interview Magazine, November 15, 2019, https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/rashid-johnson-hauser-and-wirth-exhibition-the-hikers). This micro-macro interplay is very present in Untitled Escape Collage, which invites detailed inspection even as it aims to be immersive and sublime. Of special note is vibrancy here; Johnson’s work is often spare, but Untitled Escape Collage is filled with color, notably an affecting purple. It reminds one Wassily Kandinsky’s fantastical paintings.
The Escape Collage series, like much of Johnson’s work, has autobiographical roots. Johnson recalls of his childhood in Chicago, “As a kid I remember thinking that if you could actually live in a place with palm trees, if you could get away from the city and the cold, that meant you’d definitely made it” (“Rashid Johnson,” Milwaukee Art Museum, 2017, https://mam.org/exhibitions/details/rashid-johnson/). The present work is therefore an act of longing and optimism, even when the dream of the so-called good life is off the table for so many families. Like an altar, Untitled Escape Collage gathers disparate parts together in an effort to create a new and gentler world. Relatedly, Johnson collaborated with the poet Robin Coste Lewis by providing another Escape Collage to illustrate her poem in The New York Times. Lewis writes, “Now our days/will be out of doors, instead/of inside them; our future will lie/with petals, caterpillars, well-dressed/moss, hypnotic snails, clapping/orange frogs that know to climb/which tree for the ripest alligator/pear. Every ocean has known us/Mother says, no shore is insignificant” (R.C. Lewis, “A Picture and a Poem: An Artist and a Poet Contemplate Freedom,” The New York Times, February 15, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/t-magazine/art/rashid-johnson-robin-coste-lewis-art-poem.html). Lewis could be describing the world of the present work, with its promise of new landscapes to explore, filled with amazing flora and fauna.
With the emotionally replete Untitled Escape Collage, Johnson revels in juxtapositions—between materials, and between the cold memories and warm dreams of his childhood. The uniting factor, as has always been the case in his oeuvre, is paint, which Johnson uses as a means of bringing histories together. He does not give us a sense of where we could escape to through his assemblages. Rather, he leaves it up to us to imagine new utopias in which we might find refuge.