Tim Johnson

Tim Johnson’s first solo exhibition was held at Gallery A in Sydney in 1970. His artistic practices influenced by conceptual art, encompass an extensive range of media, from performance art, installation, live music, photography and painting and have been at the forefront of contemporary art practice in Australia. He is important in the debate of post-modern cross–cultural referencing and appropriation as well as discussions about Australia’s interconnection with Asia and Eastern philosophy in comparison to our Western heritage.

In the early 1980s, Johnson spent time learning from and collaborating with Aboriginal artists from the Pintupi, Warlpiri and Anmatyerr communities at Papunya in the Western Desert. It was a profoundly influential period in his artistic development. Since that time his work has drawn on a wide range of cultural references, combining iconography from Aboriginal, Buddhist and east Asian sources alongside his own unique personal imagery, in an exploration of artistic and spiritual connections across cultures. Cross cultural referencing in Johnson’s paintings is implemented through a process of intellectual involvement, respect, collective dialogue and collaboration with artists from different cultural and religious traditions, a result of Johnson’s belief in an art that is induced from life experience.

Tim Johnson said, “By looking at Indigenous, traditional and religious art I found new ways to paint and a new sense of purpose and possibility.”

Johnson has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally. His solo exhibitions include The Luminous Ground, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2013); Tim Johnson: Painting Ideas, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (2010) and Art Gallery of NSW (2009); Tim Johnson, Glasgow Museum (1994); Across Cultures, Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne (1993); Languish, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (1986) and so on. Johnson’s work is held in the National Gallery of Australia, in all state and regional galleries and in major institutional, corporate and private collections in Australia and overseas.

Artworks 

Crop Circles (61x183 cm, 2020)

This a painting about the worldwide phenomenon of unexplained designs that appear, often overnight, in fields of grain. These designs are usually abstract and reference cultural information as well as mathematics and even astronomy. I have placed these at the centre of four of the panels and in the second panel used an image of two Indigenous artists working on a painting to put my use of dots (with permission after working at Papunya in the 1980s) in context. Around these central motifs are images of water and mountains borrowed from traditional Chinese embroidery, usually at the bottom of each panel, and imagery from Tibetan thangkas that includes Buddhas, meditators and temples. There are also images of Native Americans , blues singers, UFO's, ceremonial artefacts and abstract forms that emerge during the painting process that together create a kind of ideal, mythological world.