Mitchell Johnson Paintings in the 2025 WSJ Magazine

 

Mitchell Johnson "Giant Race Point Chair" painting in the March 2025 WSJ Magazine

Mitchell Johnson "Presidio #30" painting in the February 2025 WSJ Magazine

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.

Read more about the exhibition in these articles in Hyperallergic, Whitehot Magazine and InMenlo.

Seven note card sets accompany the San Francisco exhibition and are available at Amazon, SFMOMA, Keplers Books, Explore Booksellers in Aspen and PAAM in Proincetown.

"Luxembourg," 2022 appears in both the January 15, 2024 New Yorker Magazine and the February print issue of Artforum

 

"Luxembourg," 2022 16x16 inches oil/canvas

This painting, "Luxembourg," 2022, appears in both the January 15, 2024 issue of the New Yorker and the February issue of Artforum Magazine. If you click on the image above you'll see a higher quality photo that you can zoom in on to see the paint, the surface. This little kiosk in the Luxembourg garden has intrigued me for years but I only recently made a few paintings of it. When I first went to France in 1989 I was in Paris briefly and I would go for very long runs that often went through the Luxembourg and I'm pretty sure that's the first time I saw this kiosk. Like all of my paintings, this isn't so much a record of what was there as it is a jumping off point for some shapes and colors that I'm assembling that feel mysterious, baffling, complex. The chair could be any color, any location - whatever the painting needs. The way that the painting is built, the touch of the paint application are both very important and have evolved over 40 years. Each are impossible to consciously strategize or control. The painting may not work and it might get destroyed. Time will tell.

I talk about my painting process at length in various interviews. See Savvy Painter, Painting Perceptions, Huffington Post, I Like Your Work Podcast, Studio Break Podcast.

Donald Kuspit has written a lot about my work and you can read two of his essays at Whitehot Magazine.

There are two exhibits in 2024:

January-February, 2024
Selected Work 1988-2024
Flea Street Menlo Park

May 17-September 29, 2024
La révélation de Meyreuil, an exhibition of 50 small paintings
Musée de la Villa les Camélias in Cap d’Ail, France