1.6—4.9.2016

LARRY JOHNSON

Larry Johnson’s work displays a fascination with language, the rhetoric of celebrity, and the processes of appropriation. By superimposing newspaper excerpts couched in the language of classic modernism, he confronts the viewer with the need to decode something twice over, i.e., the text that becomes image and our fascination with popular icons. If the formal influence of Edward Ruscha’s language paintings is palpable, Johnson’s works show greater affinities in reality with the deconstructions of William Leavitt or the appropriations of Sherrie Levine, given that formal appeal is so stamped by an “endgame” atmosphere of modernism.