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Lot Essay
Bruise Painting by Rashid Johnson confronts the viewer with a multitude of black and blue forms, half-human faces rendered in vital planes of line and color. Measuring over eight feet by seven feet, this monumental painting acts like a mural that slowly unfolds its universal message of empathy and understanding. Bruise Painting becomes a skin of sorts comprised of the aleatory and grid-like patterns alike that build the natural world, and, as in nature, every cell is both connected and interdependent. Emerging from this latticework is a series of faces akin to the carnivalesque, surreal crowds of James Ensor. Yet even within this complex scene, we can be sure that there is some respite for these figures, since bruises are signs of the body’s healing. Subject matter is not the only appeal of Bruise Painting. Johnson’s technical rigor is evident in his creation of a signature pigment combination for this series. This combination of precisely formulated pigments with raw linen engenders a textured scene with a unique interplay of foreground and background.
Emerging from Johnson’s celebrated Anxious Men series (2015-2017), the Bruise Paintings (2021—) respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying political turmoil. Yet, as always, Johnson also shows his skilled command of art history. The bruise or wound in art history carries a religious connotation, especially with images of Saint Thomas, like Caravaggio’s Baroque masterpiece The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1602). In it, we see the doubting disciple’s finger physically enter Christ’s flesh in a way that is both shocking and sensual. Similarly, in Caravaggio’s Young Sick Bacchus (c. 1593), there could be a correlation between the black and blue of Bruise Painting and the god’s sickly appearance inspired by the artist’s own grave illness. Fast forwarding to the twentieth century, perhaps the most famous comparisons would be Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #30 (1979) and Nan Goldin’s Heart-Shaped Bruise, NYC (1980). As with Bruise Painting, Sherman and Goldin focus on social ills with a disarming beauty. Given that the present work also has a filmic quality with its narrative progression of faces and scenes, we could also compare it to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986). The blue tones of the film give the entire mise-en-scène a bruise-like quality, which is made flesh by Isabella Rossellini’s black eyes. This outpouring of emotion resonates throughout Bruise Painting, which translates a world of feeling into the language of abstraction.
The Bruise Paintings are also part of Johnson’s activist practice. Earlier this year, he donated a smaller work from the Bruise Paintings to an auction that raised $6 million to save the childhood home of musician and civil rights icon Nina Simone. This charitable stance also characterizes Johnson’s relationship with younger artists, especially Black artists in need of exposure and mentorships. In a recent encounter, curator Antwaun Sargent recounts his visit with Johnson, “In the southwest corner of the gallery, Johnson installed a chair sculpture with a speaker that serenades the room with Louis Armstrong’s ‘(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue,’ a nod to the way modernism reflects jazz’s sense of improvisation and rhythm. ‘This is how Blackness enters the discourse of modern art!’ Johnson said” (A. Sargent, “The Anxiety and Ecstasy of Rashid Johnson,” GQ, October 3, 2023).
Johnson’s work is currently on view in an exhibition, “Severn Rooms and a Garden,” at Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2023). He has also mounted recent solo exhibitions at the Metropolitan Opera, New York (2021), the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville (2021), and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2021). Other examples of the Bruise Paintings are in the permanent collections of the Phoenix Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and the Seattle Art Museum.
Emerging from Johnson’s celebrated Anxious Men series (2015-2017), the Bruise Paintings (2021—) respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying political turmoil. Yet, as always, Johnson also shows his skilled command of art history. The bruise or wound in art history carries a religious connotation, especially with images of Saint Thomas, like Caravaggio’s Baroque masterpiece The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1602). In it, we see the doubting disciple’s finger physically enter Christ’s flesh in a way that is both shocking and sensual. Similarly, in Caravaggio’s Young Sick Bacchus (c. 1593), there could be a correlation between the black and blue of Bruise Painting and the god’s sickly appearance inspired by the artist’s own grave illness. Fast forwarding to the twentieth century, perhaps the most famous comparisons would be Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #30 (1979) and Nan Goldin’s Heart-Shaped Bruise, NYC (1980). As with Bruise Painting, Sherman and Goldin focus on social ills with a disarming beauty. Given that the present work also has a filmic quality with its narrative progression of faces and scenes, we could also compare it to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986). The blue tones of the film give the entire mise-en-scène a bruise-like quality, which is made flesh by Isabella Rossellini’s black eyes. This outpouring of emotion resonates throughout Bruise Painting, which translates a world of feeling into the language of abstraction.
The Bruise Paintings are also part of Johnson’s activist practice. Earlier this year, he donated a smaller work from the Bruise Paintings to an auction that raised $6 million to save the childhood home of musician and civil rights icon Nina Simone. This charitable stance also characterizes Johnson’s relationship with younger artists, especially Black artists in need of exposure and mentorships. In a recent encounter, curator Antwaun Sargent recounts his visit with Johnson, “In the southwest corner of the gallery, Johnson installed a chair sculpture with a speaker that serenades the room with Louis Armstrong’s ‘(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue,’ a nod to the way modernism reflects jazz’s sense of improvisation and rhythm. ‘This is how Blackness enters the discourse of modern art!’ Johnson said” (A. Sargent, “The Anxiety and Ecstasy of Rashid Johnson,” GQ, October 3, 2023).
Johnson’s work is currently on view in an exhibition, “Severn Rooms and a Garden,” at Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2023). He has also mounted recent solo exhibitions at the Metropolitan Opera, New York (2021), the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville (2021), and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2021). Other examples of the Bruise Paintings are in the permanent collections of the Phoenix Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and the Seattle Art Museum.