Gretta Johnson

While working on this body of paintings, Gretta has been immersed in Irene Gad’s book about Jung and Tarot. There’s a part of the text that she pointed to where “the corpse of the picture is the residue of the past and represents a man who is no more… cutting off the limbs, dividing them into smaller parts and changing them into the nature which is in stone.” In this way she is interested both in atomization, as a process that actually relates to bricks which can be regrouted into new things.

The art historical precedent that I keep coming back to is the work of Paul Klee, who famously advised taking a line for a walk to see where it goes. A beauty of Gretta’s painting is that movement in and out of spontaneity, alternating between letting a line or color lead the painting and then retaking the lead herself. Klee was also an educator at The Bauhaus school, which sought to integrate approaches in illustration and design into what a “painting” could be. Her journey can also be a mode of abstraction and spontaneity in Johnson’s work.

Johnson’s 2015 book OOLM has no words. The only letters are in the title, which themselves form a face, “OO” eyes, “L” nose, “M” mouth. Where those lush color pencil drawings move the reader through the book, accumulating a whole. Johnson’s new paintings are self-contained, with canvases like In Parts and Field Vision presenting bisected space in a balancing act of rich and sparse. Abstractions also become nerve endings and lit matches, language and blood.

It also seems remiss not to mention one of Gretta Johnson’s other jobs in relation to this body of work, as the label maker and artistic designer for Grimm Artisanal Ales. The Tin Man and the aluminum can, an abstract drawing that goes outside of a can full of liquid. The Tin Man's head is an object that you open and drink the contents into your body. It is a mode of functional art making that can only be seen as another leg to the metaphorical chair of Gretta Johnson’s main work. Gretta’s compositions are certainly rooted in the underground comix movement, but play up this Art Deco blocking with an older Art Nouveau style of “whiplash” lines and sinuous asymmetry.

To return from spirits to spirituality, consider the figure of the funnel as it relates to this body of work. A substance enters the fat end of a funnel and emerges through the narrow spout end. Our faces function as inverse funnels when inhaling, as air comes in through the narrow end and expands inside our bodies. In the lower right corner of the canvas, First Breath, the nest of lines on the disembodied vessel shape glow as veins swollen in a moment of pulmonary function. In this painting, as well as, Time’s Release and Shared Spirit, visualizing an exhalation feels like a synesthetic representation of breath into thought. The golden abstraction that seems to emerge from the shared mouth in Shared Spirit, evokes the theosophical paintings of Hilma af Klint. The movements in Gretta’s work are quiet as they are mysterious and lyrical. Conjured as someone who follows a line with wet paint on a brush, and who reels in the leash when it's time to follow the yellow brick road.

Gretta Johnson (b. 1985) earned her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. This will be her second solo exhibition with Tappeto Volante Projects.