Jasper Johns

Matthew Marks is pleased to present Jasper Johns: Recent Drawings. The exhibition includes twelve drawings made over the past two years.

In a series of eight drawings, small images at the top of each work are taken from a drawing Johns made fifteen years ago on Shrinky Dinks, a plastic material made for children to draw on that shrinks approximately 60 percent when heated. The works incorporate many of the artist’s well-known motifs drawn from his extensive personal lexicon, including the silhouette of a young boy, which first appeared in Johns’s painting series The Seasons (1986). Other familiar motifs include a Rubin’s vase composed of two self-portraits in profile facing one another, the Sign Language Alphabet, and an abstracted figure inspired by Picasso’s 1938 painting Reclining Nude.

In three other drawings, Johns again revisits imagery from The Seasons, in which the artist’s shadow is flanked by references to his earlier work. In these new drawings, Johns transforms the image into a memento mori, replacing his shadow with a skeleton holding a skull.

“Smiling skeletons, sinister skulls… a constellation of elegiac subjects that face us with intransigence and difficulty,” art historian Michael Ann Holly has written of Johns’s work. “Visual valedictions to an art of contradiction: absence and presence, … melancholy and joy, agitation and silence, death and beauty.”