(Inside) Out: 
New Work by Erick Johnson

Exhibition on view March 10 through April 14, 2018

gallery neptune & brown is pleased to announce (Inside) Out, a solo exhibition of new work by New York based artist Erick Johnson. This will be Johnson’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. (Inside) Out captures the conversation between Johnson's isolated work inside the studio and his experience beyond, influenced by chance abstract compositions found walking the streets of New York City.

Johnson works in neatly arranged parallelogram blocks, sanding, scraping, wiping, and squeegeeing layer upon layer of translucent color. Not tied to any one particular tool or paint brush, he conveys infinite, nonstop motion through his varied process. The movement and energy of the slanted parallelogram shape introduce physicality into the artist's own minimalist language, as he investigates the relationships between rhythm, form, and color. Inspired by Jungian psychology and the Ouroboros (snake that eats its own tail), Johnson builds his geometric compositions around the concepts of completion, wholeness, and energetic movement. Johnson combines free abstraction and grounded geometry to explore balance, harmony, and the unpredictable path to each.

Born in 1959 in San Francisco, Johnson received his MFA from Bard College in 2005 and has shown publicly for more than twenty years in the United States and abroad. His work displays the influence of both coasts—from the West Coast, we see traces of Richard Diebenkorn's vibrant color palette; from the East Coast, we see elements of Mark Rothko's transcendent color fields. Johnson's work also follows Josef Albers' examination of the square and of the visceral impact of color relationships. Johnson equates his sense of color to a jazz musician's sense of tone: the geometric templates of his work provide a music-like structure, allowing him space to improvise with color.