Past Things and Present
Jasper Johns Since 1983
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
10 July – 19 September 2004
A major exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art includes more than 90 works by the iconic American artist JASPER JOHNS: this is their first and only showing at a UK venue and it is Johns’s first exhibition in Britain in almost thirty years. Past Things and Present: Jasper Johns Since 1983 explores the artist’s work of the last two decades through a selection of related paintings, prints and drawings that demonstrate his continually evolving and innovative talent. The exhibition introduces new motifs that present a marked shift in his approach to image-making.
One of the forerunners of Pop Art, Jasper Johns has exercised a profound influence on western painting of the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1930, he moved to New York in the early 1950s and quickly earned critical acclaim for his paintings of flags, targets, letters and numbers.
Past Things and Present highlights Jasper Johns’s practice of reworking motifs – which include faces, watches and his mysterious ‘Green Angel’ – in different media. The exhibition will include numerous works related to The Seasons, Jasper Johns’s four-part cycle of images begun in 1985 as well as a series of works which incorporate traced outlines from paintings by Holbein, Grünewald and Picasso.
Jasper Johns has consistently reinvented himself in response to new stimuli and since the early 1980s his imagery has become increasingly autobiographical. His recent work is full of references to his studio and home, to his childhood and to his own work and the work of other artists. In 1984 he stated:
“In my early work I tried to hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions… I sort of stuck to my guns for a while, but eventually it seemed like a losing battle. Finally, one must simply drop the reserve.”
Past Things and Present is part of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s Year of American Art. Throughout 2004–5, the Gallery is showing work by some of the giants of post-war and contemporary American art including Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha and Cindy Sherman.
The exhibition is organised by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and has toured to Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina. Following its European debut at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, it will travel to Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM) in Valencia and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.
An illustrated catalogue for the exhibition is available.
SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART
75 Belford Road, Edinburgh
