David Edward Johnson (b.1970)

Frederick Holmes and Company - Gallery of Modern & Contemporary Art proudly introduces New York-based abstract assemblage artist, David Edward Johnson, in his Seattle debut!

Johnson’s work has been exhibited in galleries, universities, and art fairs in New York, New Jersey, Texas, Maine, California, Illinois, Colorado, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and was presented at the 2021 London Art Biennale. Johnson is an artist of enormous enthusiasm, talent and curiosity about all things. He’s a skilled painter, assemblage artist, video producer, social media contributor with thousands of followers, a deep knowledge of art, culture, American history, and a man with rich eclectic tastes in music.

Johnson was given his first solo exhibition, NO ROSES IN DECEMBER, at the esteemed Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY, which ran for nine weeks, January 27 thru March 31, 2024. The museum’s permanent collection of over 11,000 works is comprised of work by iconic figures of American Modern and Contemporary including Robert Rauschenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, Al Held, Andy Warhol, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Andrew Wyeth, Ernest Trova, Philip Guston, Jean Michel Basquiat, and others Founded in 1897, ground was broken in 1965 for the current museum’s building. designed and built in a brutalist classic style by legendary architect, I.M. PEI. The Everson Museum of Art re-opened in it’s new space in 1968.

Artist Statement

“I am a mixed media visual artist. The rhythmic, the esoteric, the mystic, the poetic, and the intuitive drive my work. All of those shape my aesthetic and give my pieces backbone. The breadth of the sublime, the mist of inner spaces, and the intrinsically American are also found on my canvases. My long background as both a writer and designer roots the abstract work in language, both conceptual and visual.”

“I am most interested in exploring belief systems, the birth and death of the American Dream, the nature and validity of desire, as well as identity and loss on a personal level. Visually, my work lies at the intersection of the organic, the geometric, the iconic, the abstract, and the found. All of that takes shape into mostly large-scale assemblage pieces that hover in between mediums. I feel like my body of work can be encapsulated in three words : Abstraction, Definition and Deconstruction.”

The gallery’s introductory exhibition of Johnson’s assemblages is comprised of two groupings: PLASTIC ICONOCLASTIC, an examination and humorous critique of American popular and consumer culture; and secondly, his tribute to the origins and iconic figures of American Jazz, BOOGIE WOOGIE RUMBLE, which was created exclusively for this introductory FREDERICK HOLMES AND COMPANY show.

I’m certain that Seattle’s collectors and visitors will find Johnson’s work as compelling and exciting as I have and anticipate many will be adding his work to their collections!

The Plastic Iconoclastic Series

I sum up my work in three words : ABSTRACTION, DEFINITION, and DECONSTRUCTION. This series is focused on the last of those three.

The mid-century Pop Art movement was often driven by a desire to subvert the visual culture of its day. Whether through the repetition of image, the redefinition of iconography, the skewing of consumerism, or unique juxtaposition, the movement was an examining lens.

However, with time, those pop art images BECAME the icons themselves that they sought to remove the power from. As an example, it would be difficult to think of Marilyn Monroe or Elvis without thinking of Warhol’s work.

With PLASTIC ICONOCLASTIC, I am once again breaking the icons. I see the series as both an extension of the work of James Rosenquist, Robert Rauschenberg, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Richard Hamilton and a surgical deconstruction of it and the movement at large. I think of these as assemblage work at the cultural level — assembling shattered shards of societal and artistic iconography into new vessels for meaning and optics for examination and consideration.

AI images suggesting mid-century celebrity culture, brand imagery, cinematic references, wheatpaste and patterning, real vintage western comic pages, and actual detergent packaging from the 1960s all find their home in these deeply-layered and heavily-crafted works.

The Boogie-Woogie Rumble Series

With my first jazz-based series, AVANT-GARDE, I explored the innovation and invention inherent in the mid-century American jazz movement. For this new musically minded series, I am going back a little further in time.

The Harlem Rennaisance was a time of incredible cultural flowering. Poets, writers, musicians, performers, thinkers, all spurring each other on to new heights and fresh avenues of exploration on the New York City streets of the 1920s and 30s. This body of work is built around the work of one of those legendary talents, poet Langston Hughes.

“THE BOOGIEWOOGIE RUMBLE,” embodies an exploration of the Hughes poem “Boogie: 1 A.M.” through 5 large scale mixed media works. He was personally very inspired by the jazz scene and used it throughout his poetry and writing as a thematic anchor. Four seminal jazz greats, and Hughes himself, are portrayed here using a meticulously built-up mixure of paint, collaged found objects like vintage sheet music from the period for each artist featured, and other imagery and texture cues such as real wheatpaste personally curated from NYC streets.

It adds up to a body of work that aims to vibrate with the electric intensity of that creative time and the storied swing of those legends.