Rashid Johnson with 'Poetry' at Spazio Zero, GAMeC Bergamo

From 19 February to 15 May 2016, GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo is pleased to present the first solo exhibition at an Italian institution by Rashid Johnson (b. Chicago, 1977; lives and works in New York), an African-American artist considered central in the debate revolving around the issues of identity, integration and memory.
After studying photography, Johnson embarked on an extraordinary career in 2001, when at the age of just twenty-one he was the youngest artist to be invited to the ground-breaking “Freestyle” exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, curated by Thelma Golden, who coined the term “Post-Black Art”.
His career has developed through his recent solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2012), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver (2014), the Kunsthalle in Winterthur (2015) and the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (2016).
Curated by Stefano Raimondi, the exhibition staged by GAMeC showcases a series of previously unseen and historical works to offer a more intimate yet also universal interpretation of Johnson’s artistic practice, moving away from simplistic labelling and entering into the fascinating network of the formal and narrative stratifications, suggestions, and personal and historical experiences that shape his works.
The title Poetry thus refers to two elements at once: first, to the memory of the artist’s mother who, before earning a PhD in African History and becoming a professor, wrote poetry books that influenced Johnson’s artistic practice; secondly, to a vision of the world that cannot be reduced to a monolithic identity or simple syntax, but to the ability to embrace an array of knowledges and languages, an invitation to view the exhibition according to one’s own sensitivity, the fact that art must always relate to the broader issues of life
and talk to us about the human condition, and the idea that a poem is read within the soul even before it is considered in its words.
This ungrammatical grammar, an endless story and the sum of contradictions, is first applied in the diversity of the media and materials presented at the exhibition, which have become a signature and the privileged gateway to the artist’s world: sculptures, paintings, installations and videos with typical elements such as black soap, wax, ceramic tiles, wallpaper and spray enamel, but also books, vinyl records, oyster shells, shea butter, iron and plants.
Some elements are bearers of a cultural phenomenon: wax, soap and shea butter were widely used during the African diaspora and were later associated with the cultural ideology of Afrocentrism in the United States in the late twentieth century; the vinyl records and books instead refer to a more intimate story, in which the albums the artist listened to as a boy, his father’s electrical instruments and the texts he took from his mother’s library are part of what is defined as the memorialization of the process of appropriation and retransposition of the domestic space.
All the materials carry these memories, but in the artist’s hands they become the objects of a broader narration. Taken out of their original context, they have been chosen for their ability to interact; they lose their biographical or knowledge-related connotation and are used as instruments that can create signs and graphic traces, becoming lines and thus references to minimal art, as elements to distribute information and subtexts.
For Johnson “the artist functions as a time traveller” and his work is described “as a means or portal to effectively rewrite history, not as a revision but as a work of fiction”.
To create a fast-paced and continuous dialogue among the various works, experiences, techniques and materials, everything is positioned within a single space and is immediately visible as a unique ensemble.
The centre of the room is occupied by an imposing work entitled Fatherhood (2015). This pyramidal totemic sculpture is a form of delocalized psyche and its exoskeleton – composed of steel cubes of various sizes, stacked to create a three-dimensional grid – evokes the geometric compositions of Sol LeWitt and the modular works of Carl Andre.
This structure, emptied, is then filled with a series of objects and meanings that have defined the artist’s language: familiar objects with a powerful personal and social significance, dozens of houseplants, growing lights and a series of books, including several copies of Bill Cosby’s best-seller Fatherhood, which examines the theme of being a father but is linked with the controversial actor.
The sculpture interacts and dialogues with the works along the perimeter of the Spazio Zero, creating a constellation of readings.
Among them, Between Heaven and Hell (2012) is central to understanding the transformation of meanings in objectual forms. In fact, the work is configured like a bookshelf or, to use the artist’s works and referring to Lawrence Weiner’s book, Something To Put Something On. The act of finding a space to set down one’s story is tied to the need to conserve but also to manifest often contradictory infinity, the various stimuli that in infinite “heres and nows” contribute to creating identify and an intuitive and fascinating language.
Alongside vinyl records and books, the sculpture includes a bust – merely roughed out – in shea butter. This material, which originated in Africa, became very popular during the Afrocentric movement that influenced part of the artist’s childhood.
Goodbye Derrick (2012) is an exceptional abstract painting on a red oak floor, the surface of which is branded with several ambiguous signs that are repeated. They are images of a gun sight, from the logo of the hip-hop group Public Enemy, which reveals both a powerfully aggressive stance as well as in-depth study of geometric forms, palm leaves and the signs of Sigma Pi Phi, the first African-American professional and cultural association, the name of which is written in Greek letters.
Nevertheless, this repetition process modifies its meaning, bringing it to the more formal level of abstraction, underscoring how form, composition and the use of materials are a key point in the artistic discourse, and asking the question of how these objects become meanings, of what they are once they lose the function for which they were originally conceived.
The exhibition also includes the works Them (2014), Untitled Anxious Men (2014) and Positions (2015), executed using three different types of tiles: mirror, white and coloured. They are very gestural and harmonious works, and as a result the artist calls them “Cosmic Slop”, a term referring to a fictional dance, as if the painting had emerged and were the consequence of a “physical” and performative movement around it. Black soap is literally dripped onto it, shifting and circumnavigating the work as if it were an island; the tiles create a two-dimensional grid (which, in the case of Position, is extended to the third dimension through the use of colour).
Untitled Anxious Men, in particular, seems to evoke Dubuffet’s Art Informel because of the exceptional power with which the head emerges – the doodle of a figure, completely out of scale and proportion – to take over all possible space, as only works of Art Brut can do.
The contrast between the white ceramic tiles and the magnetism of the anonymous and restless face, incised in the poured black soap, creates irrepressible emotional density. Here as well, there is an autobiographical element, as anxiety, neurosis and psychotherapy are frequent themes in Johnson’s work.
The exhibition is part of a series in honour of Arturo Toffetti.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue published by GAMeC Books.
The volume, available at the museum bookshop starting in March, will include views of the layout designed for GAMeC’s Spazio Zero; it will be presented to the public on 13 May 2016 during an event that is part of ARTDATE.
We are grateful to GAMeC Club for its generous contribution to the publication of the catalogue.
The exhibition is being staged thanks to the support of Hauser & Wirth.
Biography Rashid Johnson was born in Chicago in 1977. He earned his degree in photography from Columbia College Chicago and in 2005 he completed his master’s degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

19 FEBRUARY – 15 MAY 2016
Rashid Johnson - Poetry
Curated by Stefano Raimondi
GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo
Spazio Zero
Opening: 18 February 2016, 7 p.m.
www.gamec.it