DOMINIK MERSCH GALLERY: TIM JOHNSON 'OTHERKIN' by Dominik Mersch Gallery

TIM JOHNSON ‘OTHERKIN’ 06.03 – 29.03.2014

DOMINIK MERSCH GALLERY is delighted to announce the third solo exhibition of eminent Sydney based artist Tim Johnson. Often described as ‘floating worlds,’ Tim Johnson’s extraordinarily powerful paintings embrace the spiritual iconography of a range of cultures including those of Aboriginal Australia, the Buddhist East and Native America.

‘Johnson’s paintings are landscapes of desire, images of impossible unity, imagined syntheses of cultural and visual systems that freely draw upon images whose meaning we do not necessarily recognise or understand,‘ wrote Linda Michael in 2001. The dot painting of Papunya, a Tibetan Thanka, Radio Birdman logos - all may find their place in the work of Tim Johnson. But there is nothing cynical about this bower-bird approach. His painting style, which is actually a mixture of styles, is influenced by these sources in both a technical and theoretical way. The paintings are hypothetical landscapes. Johnson frequently collaborates with artists from other spheres and has produced a number of works with Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Karma Phuntsok, Me Li Thi and Brendan Smith. This year marks a milestone of forty-four years exhibiting for Tim Johnson. His first solo exhibition was in 1970 and he has since featured extensively in Biennales and Documenta IX as well as a major survey exhibition ‘Tim Johnson: Painting Ideas’, in the Art Gallery of NSW, QAGOMA and The Ian Potter Museum, 2009, the Third Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at Queensland Art Gallery and recently the exhibition ‘Australia’ at the Royal Academy of the Arts, London.

Artist Statement This exhibition "Otherkin" takes a look at a world where people see themselves as other than human. As a concept, otherkin sums up the approach taken in the paintings, where the painting itself has multiple identities or points of view and is, to quote Rimbaud "an other". The paintings are of the human world, but are also about another world. This is not a difficult concept. Buddhism for example offers a map of human consciousness with celestial possibilities and in most cultures deities have human characteristics but are predominately "awesome" to use an overused word. When I paint there is a flood of imagery available to me as well as all the imagery that flows from painterly activity and the various processes and styles that I use. I choose imagery from many sources, sometimes at random, but usually when it parallels my own experiences. I look for images that portray the psychology and the excitement of looking into other worlds and offer a means of transcending the one we are in. An artist doesn't need to be too descriptive when the paintings speak for themselves, but I feel that I am exploring possible representations of the human spirit, in a kind of virtual reality. So Buddhist, Daoist, Animist, an extra-terrestrial perspective and so on are bought together in this work. The dots though universal in many ways are an obvious acknowledgement of Western Desert art and stem from my many visits to Papunya in the 1980's and from my wish to be influenced by Aboriginal art without trespassing. I still think painting is like music, where repetition and practice allows one to get inside and explore the world that is being created. In these paintings there is a world you can enter that's partly familiar, part of a vision and informed by conceptual, postmodern, eclectic and esoteric art.

Tim Johnson, 2014

‘The Vajra of the Earth’, 2014, acrylic/linen, 92 x62cm, with Daniel Bogunovic & Yimon Park, $4,400