New Exhibition: Ezra Johnson, Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing, at the Mindy Solomon Gallery
Mindy Solomon Gallery is pleased to present Sunday Morning Coming Down. Ezra Johnson’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. In this group of new paintings, Johnson has been inspired by what he calls the “tropical noir” atmosphere of Tampa, engaging with objects, spaces and scenes that are built up with many layers of oil paint, applied in sheets of color often showing the residue of earlier layers.
While these paintings depict places and objects they are constructed from thoughts, memory and drawings. Johnson intentionally avoids photographic sources to allow the personal and formal needs of the painting to combine. Johnson obscures and exposes layers from previous stages of the painting. Guided by the process of painting itself and open to the possibility of changing course or following another thread at any moment. His subjects need not explain themselves or why they are there, they emerge from a process of painterly discovery with no fixed resolution apparent at the beginning.
Ezra Johnson is a painter based in Tampa Florida. Born in 1975 in Wenatchee, Washington. He received an MFA from Hunter College in New York in 2006 and a BFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2000. Johnson’s painting practice often expands into animation and sculpture.
Johnson has exhibited at many prestigious museums such as the Fundación AMMA in Mexico City, The Nerman Museum of Art in Kansas, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Site Santa Fe Biennial, the ICA in Philadelphia, as well as gallery exhibitions, nationally and internationally regularly. https://mindysolomon.com/exhibition/ezra-johnson-sunday-morning-coming-down/ To see more of Johnson’s work, visit https://www.artsy.net/mindy-solomon-gallery/artist/ezra-johnson/
Established in 2009, the Mindy Solomon Gallery specializes in contemporary emerging and mid-career artists and art advisory services. The gallery represents artists working in painting, sculpture, photography, and video in both narrative and non-objective styles. The gallery program explores the intersection of art and design through an ongoing dialog between two and three-dimensional objects, while embracing diasporic voices. Utilizing the gallery space as a platform for inventive exhibitions, museum visitations, and public lectures, Solomon invites a sense of community and aesthetic enrichment.
To see more of Johnson’s work, visit https://www.artsy.net/mindy-solomon-gallery/artist/ezra-johnson/