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| Advertisement for the exhibition of Giant Paintings in San Francisco |
Mitchell Johnson is exhibiting seven large-scale paintings in the lobby of the San Francisco skyscraper 425 Market Street from March 17 to May 30. Works include “Trinity East (Iceberg)” (2020–2024), 78×120 inches, made after a 2018 trip to Newfoundland, as well as three paintings of Johnson’s ongoing muse, the Presidio Park, with its peculiar, still-life-like collection of buildings. Seven sets of note cards accompany the exhibition and are for sale at Amazon and SFMOMA as well as other museums and bookstores.
The exhibition has been reviewed by Donald Kuspit in Whitehot Magazine in March, 2025.
Here is an excerpt of the Kuspit essay:
“Morandi and Albers are Johnson’s role models or mentors. To my mind’s eye they are phenomenologists par excellence, which is what Johnson is at his best—as in these paintings–aspires to be, however unwittingly. According to the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, in the Phenomenology of Perception, “Phenomenology is a transcendental philosophy which places in abeyance the assertions arising out of the natural attitude, but it is also a philosophy for which the world is ‘already there.’ It is painstaking…in its attentiveness and wonder, its demand for awareness.” As the philosopher John Cogan writes, in The Phenomenological Reduction, “There is an experience in which it is possible for us to come to the world with no knowledge or preconceptions in hand; it is the experience of astonishment…in the experience of astonishment, our everyday ‘knowing,’ when compared to the knowing that we experience in astonishment, is shown up as a pale epistemological imposter.” At their best, when they [Johnson’s paintings] have a kind of parsimonious aesthetic intensity and nuanced exactitude, and no longer register as the “belief-performance of our customary life in the world,” they are astonishing masterpieces of phenomenological perception, fraught with what the philosopher George Santayana calls “hushed reverberations.”
Johnson's paintings are in the permanent collections of over 35 museums as well as 700 private collections. His work has appeared in many feature films, most notably, Nancy Meyers films, The Holiday and It's Complicated. Seven paintings were also included in Crazy, Stupid, Love. Johnson's work is widely known because it has appeared in the New York Times Magazine over 200 times going back to 2012. Johnson has appeared on BFM Nice television in France and RAI 3 national television in Italy.
