![]() His own shadow appears in every print, a silhouette against the brick wall of one of his studios or the wood flooring of another. ![]() Every detail in the “Seasons” prints (which relate to paintings of the same theme) refers to an incident, place, influence or work from his own life. ![]() Johns’ ‘80s work is especially self-reflexive. but is fascinating, if a bit self-indulgent. The artist, now in his 60s, continuously recycles his own work, planting fragments from previous paintings in current prints and vice versa, pressing the images together into a compact mass, then scrambling them up again to form new patterns and relationships.īetween Johns’ method of working and the perceptual puzzles he poses, his work sometimes takes on the quality of a hall of mirrors: It reflects itself, reflecting itself, reflecting. The show calls for a slow, scrutinizing pace and an attentive eye. The show is also a dense one, much like Johns’ work, due to the repetition of so many of the images with only slight variations in composition or texture. It is a small exhibition, about 50 prints, almost all from Johns’ collection. ![]() The four basic images of the seasons evolve in individual prints through as many as 17 states, then are strung together as one horizontal image, aligned in a grid and, finally, reconfigured in the shape of a cross.Ī handy visual glossary at the entrance to the show explains many of the prints’ recurring motifs, a task also ably done by the accompanying catalogue, produced by Brooke Alexander Editions in New York, co-organizer of the show with Malcolm Warner, San Diego Museum of Art’s curator of prints and drawings. Many of the prints are shown in several states, in which Johns has made use of a veritable encyclopedia of printmaking techniques, including the processes of aquatint, lithography, dry point, etching and photogravure. Johns’ series of prints on the theme of the four seasons is traced here from its inception as a single frontispiece for a book of Wallace Stevens poems in 1985 to a complex group of works from 1990, incorporating much of the previous five years’ imagery. ![]()
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