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"Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror" Massive Retrospective Being Held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art (Sept 29, 2021–Feb 13, 2022)


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The Jasper Johns retrospective is so large it is being hosted simultaneously by two museums in two cities:  The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney, museums that have long-standing relationships with Johns.

"Few artists have shaped the contemporary artistic landscape like Jasper Johns. With a body of work spanning seventy years, and a roster of iconic images that have imprinted themselves on the public’s consciousness, Johns at ninety-one is still creating extraordinary artworks. This vast, unprecedented retrospective—simultaneously staged at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York—features a stunning array of the artist’s most celebrated paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints as well as many lesser-known and recent works. Each a self-contained exhibition, the two related halves mirror one another and provide rare insight into the working process of one of the greatest artists of our time."

"Jasper Johns’s groundbreaking work sent shock waves through the art world when it was first shown in the late 1950s, and he has continued to challenge new audiences—and himself—over a career spanning more than sixty-five years. He was born in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia; spent the majority of his adult life in New York; and today lives in Sharon, Connecticut, where, at the age of ninety-one, he remains active in his studio. Johns’s early use of common objects and motifs, language, and inventive materials and formats upended conventional notions of what an artwork is and can be. His profoundly generative practice helped spark movements including Pop art, Minimalism, and Conceptualism, among others, and has inspired successive generations of artists to this day.

Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror is the most comprehensive retrospective ever devoted to Johns’s art. Featuring his most iconic works along with many others shown for the first time, it comprises a broad range of paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures from 1954 to today across two sites. Conceived as a whole but displayed in two distinct parts, the exhibition appears simultaneously here at the Whitney and at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, two institutions with which Johns has had long-standing relationships. This unique dual structure draws on the artist’s lifelong fascination with mirroring and doubles, so that each half of the exhibition echoes and reflects the other. Organized in largely chronological order, the retrospective presents pairs of related galleries—one in each city—that offer varied perspectives on the artist’s turns of mind. Individually, each gallery focuses on a particular aspect of Johns’s thought and work through the lens of different themes, processes, images, mediums, and even emotional states. Taken together, they provide an immersive exploration of the many phases, treasures, and mysteries of a radical, enduring, and still-evolving career."

 

 

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