Larry Johnson’s first institutional exhibition in Europe, “On Location” brings together a selection of works by the artist (born 1959 in Lakewood, California) from the early 1990s to the present.
Larry Johnson: On Location
Raven Row hosts in London a selection of Larry Johnson’s works from the early 1990s to the present, all celebrating Los Angeles, in which Johnson has lived and worked all his life.
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- 10 June 2015
- London
The show’s uncontested star is Los Angeles, the city in which Johnson has lived and worked all his life. For over thirty years, L.A.’s physical and imaginary appearance has served as the set for the artist’s photo-based investigations of the glamour industry, replete with fading stars and premature deaths.
Johnson’s work bears the marks of a generation of artists sampling readymade images and texts to create seductively laconic pictures. Yet the colourful sheen of Johnson’s photo-based works is also a foil for sexual, political and semantic tension. The artist’s pictures are encryptions of a Hollywood demi-monde, referring to the cultures from which his work emerges – queer, political, filmic and theoretical. The exhibition is curated by Los Angeles-based writer Bruce Hainley, and by Antony Hudek, Curator and Deputy Director of Raven Row. Commie Pinko Guy, a publication edited by Hainley with new essays by Morgan Fisher, Lisa Lapinski, Hainley, Hudek and Wayne Koestenbaum, as well as reprints of classic underground queer writing, will accompany the exhibition.
11 June – 9 August 2015
Larry Johnson
On Location
curated by Bruce Hainley and Antony Hudek
Raven Row
56 Artillery Lane, London