People/ Places/ Objects by Lee Johnson

About

The collection of paintings and works on paper on display covers the periods before, during and after the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. As such, they cast a retrospective eye over the shifting terrain of the role of the small but important things that surround and shape us: the people, places and objects that give our lives meaning. The subject is that of ordinary, the collectively familiar, which reflects back a personal perspective - which in itself can be extraordinary. 

Art has long been used to transmute the mundane into something transcendental. Allowing us a second or longer look at what we otherwise might pass over as part of life’s wallpaper. The 2020-21 lockdowns provided many people with the time to stop and look a bit more at the world that had irreparably changed overnight and yet stayed the same. Our experience of recent events was at once deeply personally and collectively experienced. 

The small, sometimes thickly textured paintings with their muted tones and sparse highlights of lemon yellow or electric blue illuminate the subjects with an aura of vitality. As if seeing them anew. Or perhaps better than anew, seeing them more completely, as connection points between individual and collective understanding. 

About Lee Johnson

Lee was born in Wiltshire, and has lived and worked in London since 2000. He received his MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins School of Art in 2001. His works are held in the collections of Soho House, Kettle’s Yard, and University of the Arts London, as well as numerous private collections worldwide (including the UK, France, Germany, USA, and Australia).

His work has been selected for the prestigious John Moores Painting Prize (2010) and has exhibited widely, most notably Kettle’s Yard, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland, and Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Melbourne, Australia.

Lee was the first winner of our annual Open Call in 2021. People/ Places/ Objects is his first solo exhibition in Margate.