Chris Johanson

FORTHCOMING & NEW RELEASES

CHRIS JOHANSON: WINDOWS
MITCHELL-INNES & NASH
ISBN: 9780981457895 | US $10.00
Pub Date: 5/31/2013
Forthcoming

ACTIVE BACKLIST

CHRIS JOHANSON: TOTALITIES
Text by Arty Nelson.
DEITCH PROJECTS
ISBN: 9780981577166 | US $45.00
Pub Date: 1/31/2010
Active | In stock

CHRIS JOHANSON: PLEASE LISTEN I HAVE SOMETHING TO TELL YOU ABOUT WHAT IS
Text by Aaron Rose. Contributions by Sean Kennerly, Jack Hanley.
DAMIANI
ISBN: 9788889431450 | US $50.00
Pub Date: 3/1/2007
Active | Awaiting stock

CHRIS JOHANSON
Essay by Aaron Rose.
DEITCH PROJECTS
ISBN: 9780975324301 | US $20.00
Pub Date: 6/15/2004
Active | Awaiting stock

Chris Johanson

Chris Johanson: Windows

Published by Mitchell-Innes & Nash

Chris Johanson’s Windows is a unique, black-and-white artist’s book, published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York. The book features double spreads of works on paper executed by Johanson between 2007 and 2012.

Chris Johanson: Totalities

Text by Arty Nelson.
Published by Deitch Projects

This board book documents Totalities, Chris Johanson’s recent “contemporary living installation” at Deitch Projects, New York. The theme of the work is the planet Earth and its place in the universe. There is also a meditation on the natural world of plants and animals—how they live within themselves, and how they are affected by humans—with an emphasis on conservation. All of the wood used in the exhibition was recycled, either from New York State, from dumpsters near the artist’s Brooklyn studio or from discarded art-shipping crates. The artist even asked his friends and acquaintances for scraps of wood, endeavoring to give his materials a third life. In this volume, he alludes to the degradation of the planet and the beauty of the world through art, reminding us all of our terrestrial responsibilities.

Chris Johanson: Please Listen I Have Something to Tell You About What Is

Text by Aaron Rose. Contributions by Sean Kennerly, Jack Hanley.
Published by Damiani

For more than a decade, Chris Johanson has been transforming day-to-day subject matter into simple stories in paintings that make bright, flat reference to illustration or folk art: The New York Times called their look "a down-on-its-luck, cheerfully abject cartoon style… reminiscent of artists like William Wegman, Raymond Pettibon and Sue Williams." The same primary palette and angular compositions make Johanson's abstract works, which often take the form of geometric patterns or starbursts, into gleeful but sophisticated takes on Modernism. This, the artist's first major monograph, is also only the second title from Alleged Press, created by Aaron Rose of the influential Alleged gallery (1992-2002) and organizer of the groundbreaking traveling exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Beautiful Losers, in which Johanson featured prominently alongside artists such as Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, Phil Frost, Spike Jonze and Harmony Korine. Please listen I have something to tell you about what is assembles Johanson's complete works to date, as well as several new pieces that have appeared nowhere else. Each spins a world from small, diffuse details: these are scenes where nude dancers, distracted pedestrians, forests, abstract rainbows and "good vibes" exist next to one another, on a sinister, comic edge that, even in its apparent brightness, can reflect the darkest places of human experience.

Chris Johanson

Essay by Aaron Rose.
Published by Deitch Projects

Known for his expressive, skater-punk, urban landscape drawings that combine image and text in an irreverent, angst-ridden, deliberately pathetic sort of way, Chris Johanson takes over where Raymond Pettibon leaves off. Less angry and witty than his predecessor, Johanson scribbles colorful, dead-on portraits of street culture and the yuppies, hippies, hipsters, losers and drunkards who inhabit it.