About The Artist

Artist Jasper Johns is firmly placed in the American collective consciousness through his well-known later-styled Abstract Expressionist paintings, autobiographical drawings, and unusual sculptures. His work helped spark what would become the new genres of Pop Art, minimalism, and conceptual art. Born in Georgia and raised in South Carolina, he began drawing at the age of five and cultivated his artistic passion throughout his teenage years. He started attending the University of South Carolina at Columbia but soon was encouraged to move to New York, which he did in 1948.

After serving two years in the Korean War, he moved back to New York in 1954 and struck up a friendship with artist Robert Rauschenberg. It was at this time that Johns began reinterpreting the American flag through a minimalist lens, as seen in White Flag (1955) and Flag (1957). Johns expounded on this image through more paintings, prints, and drawings. At his first solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958 and subsequent exhibitions, he exhibited his flag paintings as well as other “things the mind already knows”: targets, cans, numbers, and letters. In the 1970s and 1980s, Johns employed new techniques and mediums–including cross-hatching and lithographs–resulting in increasingly abstract works approaching Dadaism. As a Grand Prize winner at the Venice Biennale in 1988, the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1997, and the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011, he has become one of the most beloved and celebrated modern American artists.

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Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA)

16145 Hart St., Van Nuys, CA 91406

T: 323 – 904 – 1950

F: 323 - 904 - 1954

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