b. 1968, San Jose, CA
Lives and works in Portland, OR
California-native Chris Johanson is a key member of San Francisco’s Mission School. Johanson engages with the meditative qualities of art-making and sincere direct communication through painting and sculpture. Johanson’s work plays between the techniques of figuration and abstraction, as he sees these two modes of working as interconnected expressions of strong beliefs in environmentalism, compassion and peaceful co-existence.
Chris Johanson was born in San Jose, California in 1968 and is based in Portland. He has exhibited widely in museums and galleries internationally over the past decade. His work has been the subject of solo shows at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Oregon (2014); LA MoCA Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, California (2013); and the Modern Institute in Glasgow, United Kingdom (2013). Johanson has been featured in important group exhibitions including Glasgow International 2012 and the 2002 Whitney Biennial. Johanson’s work is included in the public collections of the Ackland Art Museum at The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA), San Francisco and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
All images © Chris Johanson.
