Curator's Choice: Jasper Johns
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Jasper Johns (Born 1930)
Target, 1958
scuptmetal and collage on canvas
gift of Frank Stella (PA 1954), Addison Art Drive |
In the 1950s and 60s, Jasper Johns incorporated familiar, commonplace images into his paintings—flags, numbers, letters, and targets. He and other artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, who introduced found objects and imagery drawn from commercial and popular culture into their art, were the founders of the 1960s movement known as Pop Art. Unlike the earlier generation of Abstract Expressionists, who celebrated personal expression through abstract statements of color, form, and design, Pop artists focused on issues of perception through depictions of commonplace objects in painterly style.
Target, the generous gift of artist/alumnus Frank Stella (PA 1954), is a manifestation of John's Pop intentions. Choosing the form of a target as the basis of this work, he purposely erased its context and by doing so, converted its meaning. The normally brightly colored target is now a uniform dull grey and its smooth taut face, once readied for the point of an arrow or the bullet from a gun, is replaced with a thick, brushy surface of Sculptmetal, a model-maker's medium of aluminum powder in a synthetic base. The resulting work, both recognizable and transformed, rests between figurative and abstract, exploiting the tension between hand-made and ready-made, between expectation and perception.
Jasper John's Target is just one of the works featured in the current exhibition, 75 Years of Giving, on display through July 31.
