Jasper Johns

Besides his work in encaustic, oil and collage Johns uses complex graphic techniques such as lithograph and etching. But it is above all his drawings whose conception, structure and intricately interwoven detail illustrate the extreme precision of his artistic system. Painted bronzes and assemblages with plaster - cast masks, with spoons, chairs, plaster - casts of faces and bodies are among the constantly changing ways Johns depicts different levels of perception.

In 1959 Johns turned away from his hitherto strictly reductive technique. He began to paint objects from the everyday world with generous, gestural brushstrokes. He added the map of America to his central themes. In the paintings with stenciled color - words, color is either simply pure color, unrestricted energy, or it adheres to objects.

In 1960, Johns worked on minimalist, concrete studies of flags and targets in white paint and bronze. Like Rauschenberg, Johns had painted color surfaces in his early work from 1950, but he had destroyed most of these. In 1964 he began to give clearer, more direct expression to the complexity of possible relations between subject and object, between the act of painting and the painting itself. His anonymous ornaments (from tiles to the drawings of trees by the hairdresser who "invented" the anonymous pictorial structures of Johns' compositions at the beginning of the seventies), the symbols, words and also the flags and targets he took up again in the mid - sixties and of the seventies concentrate Johns' "visual and intellectual activities" in varying perspectives. Johns attempts over and over again to turn the borderland between the material and non - material worlds into an object of perception.

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