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Details
- Date
- 1984
- Media category
- Painting
- Materials used
- oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 182.7 x 122.5 x 2.5 cm stretcher
- Signature & date
Signed and dated u.r. verso on stretcher, black oil "Michael Johnson 1984".
- Credit
- Gift of Michael and Margo Johnson 2015. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program
- Location
- Not on display
- Accession number
- 64.2016
- Copyright
- © Michael Johnson/Copyright Agency
- Artist information
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Michael Johnson
Works in the collection
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About
The light and openness of the Australian environment had a profound impact on Michael Johnson's practice when he returned from New York in 1975. Johnson's paintings of the early to mid-1980s in particular demonstrated a freer application of oil paint in 'pure colour' and a tempering of the hard-edged forms that had characterised his imagery throughout the 1970s. The visual vitality of Johnson's 'Quasar' 1984 series was due in part to the 'tension' of their painterly fields of colour and the play of suspended horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines.
Commenting on their origins, Johnson has said that: 'I went into this funny period where I recalled my childhood with Quasars - I don't know what the diagonals are about - but it was a funny period where, without being figurative, I was trying to get a feel of association with experience. Not place' [1]. According to curator Barry Pearce their schismatic compositions were a 'metaphor of earth, sea, sky' which also served as a template for Johnson's pictures thereafter [2].
1. Michael Johnson quoted in Barry Pearce, Michael Johnson, Beagle Press, 2004, p 18
2. Ibid p 100 -
Exhibition history
Shown in 3 exhibitions
The subject of painting (1985), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 16 Mar 1985–21 Apr 1985
Michael Johnson paintings 1968-1986, University Gallery, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 06 Aug 1986–03 Oct 1986
Michael Johnson: Diagonal light: works from 1980-1986, Annette Larkin Fine Art, Paddington, 05 Aug 2015–12 Sep 2015
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Bibliography
Referenced in 4 publications
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Annette Larkin Fine Art, Michael Johnson: Diagonal light: works from 1980-1986., Waterloo, 2014, 2 (colour illus.).
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Terence Maloon, Michael Johnson paintings 1968-1986, Parkville, Aug 1986, 27, 33. cat.no. 7
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Paul McGillick, The subject of painting: twelve Australian painters, Sydney, 1985. cat.no. 36
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Barry Pearce, Michael Johnson, Sydney, 2004, 52-53, 92,199. plate no. 27
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