RASHID JOHNSON: ANIMA

Hauser & Wirth Paris is pleased to present Rashid Johnson’s exhibition “Anima”.

October 14 – December 21, 2024

Recognized as one of the leading voices of his generation, Rashid Johnson’s new works on view in Paris, which span painting, sculpture and film, demonstrate the artist’s longstanding interest in the concepts of interiority and self-reflection. Continuing to expand his distinctive visual lexicon, this exhibition exemplifies the artist’s interest in animism, the belief in which all things, including inanimate objects, have souls.

The exhibition marks the gallery debut of two new bodies of painting, the closely related Soul Paintings and God Paintings, both series that Johnson has developed over the past several years. Alongside and evolving out of the works on canvas are two new series of bronze sculptures, their roughly-modeled surfaces bearing witness to the artist’s hand in a way that has dominated his sculptural practice in recent years. Also on display is his latest film, ‘Sanguine,’ exploring relationships of attention and care among three generations of the artist’s family: his father, himself and his son. Through the concept of animism, the artist connects to a reality beyond the physical, building an expansive vision of the universe in which all objects, including the paintings and sculptures on view, are imbued with spiritual life.

The exhibition title, “Anima”, hints at Johnson’s continued interrogation, through his oeuvre, of the liminal space between body and soul. As part of his interior investigation, the artist cites Kevin Quashie’s ‘The Sovereignty of Quiet,’ a book which explores quiet as a different kind of expressiveness, one which characterizes a person’s desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities and fears. As Johnson says, ‘I was thinking about this idea of warmth, the idea of vulnerability, and how one begins the process of illustrating the soul.’

Throughout the exhibition, Johnson returns to an iconic form within his visual language, the evocative almond shaped vesica piscis, a leitmotif that has been in use in visual culture around the world since humanity’s earliest days.