Museum of Contemporary Arts San Diego
1100 & 1001 Kettner Blvd, San Diego. Californaia, USA
18 January – 10 May 2009
The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego presents Jasper Johns: Light Bulb. A traveling exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Jasper Johns: Light Bulb focuses on Johns’s first sculpture, Light Bulb I (1958), a recent gift to MCASD.
The exhibition will bring together for the first time Johns’ light bulb sculptures and related drawings and prints, including several drawings and modified prints from the artist’s collection that have never before been exhibited.
Jasper Johns’ sculptural output informs understanding of his two-dimensional work, just as his prints, drawings, and paintings illuminate his sculpture. A life-size cast of a commonplace object, Light Bulb I is a rephrasing of Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades.
Created in the year of Johns’s first solo exhibition in New York at the fledgling Leo Castelli Gallery, the light bulb image became a recurring motif, appearing in various media throughout Johns’s career.
The smooth, industrial form of the bulb is juxtaposed with the hand-manipulated base in which it is nestled, creating a bridge between the gestural expression of Abstract Expressionism and the cool depictions of Pop Art.
The underlying subject matter in Johns’s art is not the object represented, but the investigation of how we perceive, label, and categorize objects.
Through the accompanying two-dimensional works, Jasper Johns: Light Bulb demonstrates the artist’s interest and incomparable skill in embracing artistic process. He often made counterpart prints to his paintings and sculptures, viewing printmaking as a medium that encouraged experimentation through the ease with which it allowed for repeat endeavors.
The selection of works in this focused exhibition demonstrates the significance of the relationship between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional in Johns’s work, and the importance of the light bulb as an image he explored for over 20 years.
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