Mitchell Johnson is exhibiting seven large-scale paintings in the lobby of the San Francisco skyscraper 425 Market Street from March 17 to May 30. Works include “Trinity East (Iceberg)” (2020–2024), 78×120 inches, made after a 2018 trip to Newfoundland, as well as three paintings of Johnson’s ongoing muse, the Presidio Park, with its peculiar, still-life-like collection of buildings.
In interviews and essays, Johnson has consistently remarked on what seeing a Josef Albers/Giorgio Morandi exhibition in Bologna, Italy, in 2005 meant for his practice. That viewing cemented his change from a brushy, impressionistic paint application towards a more geometrically minded approach to composition and color. The new large paintings in this exhibit combine the geometric and color concerns with a return to a painterly surface.
Brenda Danilowitz from the Josef & Annie Albers Foundation commented on the impact of Albers and Morandi on Johnson’s work:
“About halfway into Mitchell Johnson’s 2014 monograph Color as Content there’s a portfolio of Josef Albers and Giorgio Morandi paintings juxtaposed one to a page – looking at each other, so to speak. The images are not accompanied by words, but they speak eloquently of Johnson’s admiration of and debt to these two quiet yet lofty twentieth century masters. Albers shows his mastery of color, space, and form. Morandi answers with form, space and color. No words needed. In 2005 Johnson had come across an Albers exhibition in Morandi’s eponymous museum in Bologna and recognized that something remarkable occurred when these two unlikely comrades in art faced one another. The upshot resonates in Mitchell Johnson’s work of the past two decades: precisely and meticulously arranged color and form play off each other in startling and lambent ways.”
In a 2025 Whitehot Magazine article, Donald Kuspit writes about the Morandi/Albers influence:
“Morandi and Albers are Johnson’s role models or mentors. To my mind’s eye they are phenomenologists par excellence, which is what Johnson is at his best—as in these paintings–aspires to be, however unwittingly. According to the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, in the Phenomenology of Perception, “Phenomenology is a transcendental philosophy which places in abeyance the assertions arising out of the natural attitude, but it is also a philosophy for which the world is ‘already there.’ It is painstaking…in its attentiveness and wonder, its demand for awareness.” As the philosopher John Cogan writes, in The Phenomenological Reduction, “There is an experience in which it is possible for us to come to the world with no knowledge or preconceptions in hand; it is the experience of astonishment…in the experience of astonishment, our everyday ‘knowing,’ when compared to the knowing that we experience in astonishment, is shown up as a pale epistemological imposter.” At their best, when they [Johnson’s paintings] have a kind of parsimonious aesthetic intensity and nuanced exactitude, and no longer register as the “belief-performance of our customary life in the world,” they are astonishing masterpieces of phenomenological perception, fraught with what the philosopher George Santayana calls “hushed reverberations.”
Johnson’s paintings are in the permanent collections of over 35 museums. In May, his smaller paintings will be on view at Galerie Mercier in Paris, and in June, his work will be included in group shows at the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, and at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis, Masachussetts.
For more information, visit mitchelljohnson.com and follow him on Instagram at @mitchell_johnson_artist.
