Jasper Johns: Shadow and Substance

The latest curatorial partnership between Whitechapel Gallery, London and The Gallery at Windsor features one of the most significant and influential American artists of our time, Jasper Johns.

In dialogue with the artist Robert Rauschenberg and his friends the composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham, Johns evolved a new language in art in the 1960s. As all four artists became immersed in dance and performance, the body itself entered Johns’ work, at first as fragments, but more recently the whole body appeared as a shadow or silhouette flitting through his lithographs and etchings. Johns’ prints overlay images and textures to stress process, and at the same time reflect the way our consciousness overlaps memory and perception.

The Gallery at Windsor presents ‘the body’ as it has appeared in Jasper Johns'' lithographs and etchings created with Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) print studio from the 1980s to the present. This exhibition is organised by the Whitechapel Gallery, London, where Jasper Johns had his first UK show in 1964. It is curated by Iwona Blazwick and Bill Goldston in partnership with Hilary Weston and with the artist.

In 1960, Russian émigrée Tatyana Grosman invited Johns to transform his legendary paintings into equally radical works on paper. As co-founder of ULAE with her husband Maurice Grosman, Tatyana invited a host of young artists to the modest cottage in Long Island that was ULAE headquarters. As one artist recommended another, the ULAE press came to make prints with some of the most important artists of the time. Today, under the leadership of Bill Goldston, ULAE continues to make prints with living artists that are held in major museum collections.

Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011, Jasper Johns has been the subject of major retrospectives and is one of the most influential American artists of his generation. Yet he continues to experiment, pushing the boundaries of printmaking today.

The publication features an essay by Iwona Blazwick 0–9 uses of the body, in which Johns’ interest in the body is explored through ideas such as form, sign, being, performance, memory and icon. The illustrated plate section contains all 30 works in the exhibition. There is a Q&A between Candy Stobbs and Director of ULAE, Bill Goldston which looks at the historic art of printmaking and the longstanding creative relationship between Jasper Johns and ULAE. Also included is a section of archival images from ULAE which includes historic portraits of Jasper Johns and his contemporaries.