Rae Johnson
The City
Opening Reception Saturday, September 8th, 2-6 pm
Christopher Cutts Gallery is pleased to announce its third solo exhibition by Rae Johnson.
Johnson is a celebrated senior Canadian painter who has exhibited extensively since the late 1970s. Notably, Rae Johnson was the co-founder of the ChromaZone collective which began in the early 1980s and has been a professor at OCAD since 1987.
In the exhibition’s accompanying artist statement, Johnson states,
“This series of paintings were painted from 2016 to 2018. They are a continuation of my last body of work – graphite drawings on canvas – titled Interiors shown at Cutts Gallery in 2015. The new work has re-integrated colour and my subject matter has moved from interior psychological space to outside urban spaces. The exhibition is dedicated to my home the City of Toronto with its people, streets and backyards and alleyways.
Making paintings is my way of responding to what I am witnessing in my immediate environment…. The streets and backyards, and the anonymous people walking in surreal spaces are represented in a minimal way, leaving the viewer to imagine the detail…
These paintings are an effort to reconnect viewers to an inner life that gets lost in the deluge of a manufactured artificial reality that is conditioning us to accept a world of “alternate facts”. I want my paintings to offer a space for the imagination and an affirmation of an inner life.”
The exhibition runs from September 8th – October 13th, 2018.
