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Descriptif du lot
Untitled Broken Crowd (2021) is a dazzling monumental work from one of Rashid Johnson’s most celebrated series. Twenty-eight faces emerge from a melee of ceramic tiles, mirror and branded wood. The mosaic is overlaid with colourful spray-paint, oilstick, splashed black soap and wax. Somewhere between sculpture and painting, the composition is charged with the energy and chaos of contemporary life, displaying identities in kaleidoscopic flux. Works from the ‘Broken’ series are held in institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney: in New York alone, they are represented in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Johnson has also created two colossal, site-specific mural commissions, The Broken Nine (2020-2021) and “The Travelers” Broken Crowd (2022), for the Metropolitan Opera and LaGuardia Airport.
Honoured last year with a landmark mid-career retrospective at the Guggenheim, Johnson first made waves as the youngest artist in Thelma Golden’s 2001 group exhibition ‘Freestyle’ at the Studio Museum in Harlem: a seminal moment in what came to be known as ‘post-Black’ art. Expanding from his early photographic practice, he went on to build cosmologies of varied media and domestic objects—including piles of books, tropical plants, shea butter and record covers—in a complex engagement with aspects of African-American intellectual history, collective identity and experience. The ‘Broken’ series evolved from Johnson’s ‘Anxious Men’, begun in 2015, which depicted wild-eyed faces in black wax on grids of white tiling. Johnson conceived of them as spectators to an agitated time: ‘global immigration issues, attacks on America, and attacks within America by police on young black men’ (R. Johnson quoted in C. Kino, ‘Rashid Johnson: An Anxious Man’, Cultured Magazine, Fall 2016, p. 175). With the ‘Broken’ series, he pushed the figures to breaking point, and took his practice to intricate, ambitious new heights.
The present work’s material riches invoke a wide array of associations, variously personal, poetic and political. The tiles—as in the earlier ‘Anxious Men’—echo the social space of the Russian bath house the artist attended in Chicago during his twenties. Johnson was further inspired by the variegated techniques of the Catalan Modernist Antoni Gaudí, whose work he encountered in Barcelona. The faces are assemblies of countless small shards, with some blocked out in single ceramic elements, glazed, daubed and incised with lines. Painted loops and scrawls and strips of tiled colour electrify the composition. Sections of branded red oak—recalling the scorched wooden works Johnson showed at the 2011 Venice Biennale, which evoked the violence of the transatlantic slave trade—are inlaid among fragments of mirror. When the viewer looks closely, their own broken reflection becomes part of the work.
Black soap, another longstanding material in Johnson’s art, is typically exported from West African countries such as Ghana. It is popular among African-Americans, he has explained, ‘a way to culturise oneself in Africanness as you’re exploring or looking for an identity, especially in a country that has had such a complicated history with the people’ (R. Johnson quoted in P. Laster, ‘An interview with Rashid Johnson: “I was more African before going to Africa,”’ Conceptual Fine Arts, 26 October 2016). The splashed substance here, mixed with hot wax, evokes a reach for identity amid the work’s visual confusion. Johnson also weaves in ancient art history, repeating an almond shape that represents the intersection of two circles—a Byzantine symbol of the divine. At the same time, this motif echoes the shields of warriors seen in the South African TV series Shaka Zulu, which Johnson grew up watching in the 1980s.
Where the ‘Anxious Men’ were expressions of overwhelming alarm, Untitled Broken Crowd invites multivalent readings in its intricate, glittering surface. ‘My work has always had concerns around race, struggle, grief and grievance,’ Johnson explains, ‘but also joy and excitement around the tradition and opportunities of Blackness.’ Although they have been shattered, the artist in some sense makes his figures whole again. Survivors, witnesses and stand-ins for the artist himself, they are emblems of the strength of community, and of Johnson’s own triumphs over adversity. ‘They’ve definitely been through something,’ he says, ‘but those experiences they’ve had to negotiate are maybe the ones that have left good scars’ (R. Johnson quoted in H. M. Sheets, ‘In Rashid Johnson’s Mosaics, Broken Lives Pieced Together’, The New York Times, 23 September 2021).
Honoured last year with a landmark mid-career retrospective at the Guggenheim, Johnson first made waves as the youngest artist in Thelma Golden’s 2001 group exhibition ‘Freestyle’ at the Studio Museum in Harlem: a seminal moment in what came to be known as ‘post-Black’ art. Expanding from his early photographic practice, he went on to build cosmologies of varied media and domestic objects—including piles of books, tropical plants, shea butter and record covers—in a complex engagement with aspects of African-American intellectual history, collective identity and experience. The ‘Broken’ series evolved from Johnson’s ‘Anxious Men’, begun in 2015, which depicted wild-eyed faces in black wax on grids of white tiling. Johnson conceived of them as spectators to an agitated time: ‘global immigration issues, attacks on America, and attacks within America by police on young black men’ (R. Johnson quoted in C. Kino, ‘Rashid Johnson: An Anxious Man’, Cultured Magazine, Fall 2016, p. 175). With the ‘Broken’ series, he pushed the figures to breaking point, and took his practice to intricate, ambitious new heights.
The present work’s material riches invoke a wide array of associations, variously personal, poetic and political. The tiles—as in the earlier ‘Anxious Men’—echo the social space of the Russian bath house the artist attended in Chicago during his twenties. Johnson was further inspired by the variegated techniques of the Catalan Modernist Antoni Gaudí, whose work he encountered in Barcelona. The faces are assemblies of countless small shards, with some blocked out in single ceramic elements, glazed, daubed and incised with lines. Painted loops and scrawls and strips of tiled colour electrify the composition. Sections of branded red oak—recalling the scorched wooden works Johnson showed at the 2011 Venice Biennale, which evoked the violence of the transatlantic slave trade—are inlaid among fragments of mirror. When the viewer looks closely, their own broken reflection becomes part of the work.
Black soap, another longstanding material in Johnson’s art, is typically exported from West African countries such as Ghana. It is popular among African-Americans, he has explained, ‘a way to culturise oneself in Africanness as you’re exploring or looking for an identity, especially in a country that has had such a complicated history with the people’ (R. Johnson quoted in P. Laster, ‘An interview with Rashid Johnson: “I was more African before going to Africa,”’ Conceptual Fine Arts, 26 October 2016). The splashed substance here, mixed with hot wax, evokes a reach for identity amid the work’s visual confusion. Johnson also weaves in ancient art history, repeating an almond shape that represents the intersection of two circles—a Byzantine symbol of the divine. At the same time, this motif echoes the shields of warriors seen in the South African TV series Shaka Zulu, which Johnson grew up watching in the 1980s.
Where the ‘Anxious Men’ were expressions of overwhelming alarm, Untitled Broken Crowd invites multivalent readings in its intricate, glittering surface. ‘My work has always had concerns around race, struggle, grief and grievance,’ Johnson explains, ‘but also joy and excitement around the tradition and opportunities of Blackness.’ Although they have been shattered, the artist in some sense makes his figures whole again. Survivors, witnesses and stand-ins for the artist himself, they are emblems of the strength of community, and of Johnson’s own triumphs over adversity. ‘They’ve definitely been through something,’ he says, ‘but those experiences they’ve had to negotiate are maybe the ones that have left good scars’ (R. Johnson quoted in H. M. Sheets, ‘In Rashid Johnson’s Mosaics, Broken Lives Pieced Together’, The New York Times, 23 September 2021).