Jasper Johns, Painting with Two Balls, 1960.
West London
Royal Academy
– Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth
This thematic survey of Johns’s work explores the artist’s career-long engagement with familiar motifs – flags, maps, numbers, targets – as well as his investigation into the limits of painting. In re-presenting and re-visiting familiar forms, Johns questions how meaning is generated in perception – how a group of abstract forms coalesce into a field of representation. “Every time you look at something, you bring meaning to it,” says co-curator Edith Devaney, recalling Johns’s axiom: “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Do something else to it.” These formal investigations are seeded with humour and humanity – Merce Cunningham’s footprint is visible in his 2007 aluminium revisitation of Numbers (1964), and with its divided canvas and collage elements Painting with Two Balls (1960) smuggles a smutty joke into an exercise in painting as sculptural object.