Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Rashid Johnson
American; 21st-century
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Stedelijk Museum
32%
Surrender Painting "The Great Escape". 2023. Oil on canvas
How is this not just a half-assed decades'-late post-minimal rehash? For that matter, how is this not just Johnson repeating himself? Plus, there's some annoying "check me out, getting away with painting for its own sake in the 21st-century" medium-fetishistic bullshit, which (if I'm right) is extra annoying cuz he's two decades into his career as a megagallery star artist and this shit sells. (A basically identical painting to this one sold for $3,000,000 in 2022.) But even if you were to grant that Johnson is a good-faith painter — which who knows, maybe he is — you'd have to grapple with the fact that this piece couldn't have struck a wronger balance between expressivity and seriality: the former detracts from the ontic terror of infinite regress [which in classic postminimalism was] implied by the latter. In a painting like this, the artist's hand ought to be building a humanist bridge over the pit of meaning implied by repeating forms (cf Agnes Martin). Johnson just decorates the abyss. (TFS, 2026)