This ambitious retrospective gathers 140 works—paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, an artist’s book, and a stage design—from public and private collections around the world. It spans seven decades of the long and prolific career of Jasper Johns (b. 1930, Augusta), the renowned American artist who revitalized the American art scene of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
The starting point of this retrospective is his iconic paintings of flags, targets, letters, numbers, and maps from the 1950s. In the 1960s, Johns moved from the impersonality of his early works to others in which he expressed a new mood of restrained yet intense emotion, reflecting a sense of melancholy and inner turmoil. The exhibition continues with works created during the 1970s and 1980s, including abstract images constructed with intersecting lines; pieces filled with visual references or citations of other artists from different periods; and the autobiographical Seasons series.
The exhibition concludes with a selection of pieces made in the 1990s and 2000s, in which the artist revisited some of his iconic themes while exploring new ideas, as in the Catenary series.
