Heidi Johnson

For the past ten years, Heidi Johnson has honed the contemporary social narrative by pursuing temporality found in a template of Dutch Baroque juxtaposed against Tibetan Thangka composition. Johnson celebrates the subjectivism of art and appears to abjure detachment of artist from work. Appealing to pluralistic painting ideologies, Johnson renders personal “visceral” feelings of struggle and defeat as she reacts to the past two years of her life in New York, where the “system” engulfs the individual. Motifs bloom out of season, featuring idealized apocalyptic scenes.

Johnson’s large-scale paintings on canvas portray exaggerated images of common iconography, which Johnson paints with heavy layers of either shocking hues or black-and-white oils. She uses the decorative to draw upon chaotic current events. Johnson relies on farcicality to expose her artistic intent. Capturing the grit and beauty of time by depicting monsters ravishing belles.

Johnson (born in Providence, RI) lives and works in the Mott Haven area of the Bronx, NY. While attending Tufts University for her undergraduate studies, she graduated with a B.F.A. from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts School, Boston, MA. In 2002, Johnson was awarded with the Fifth Year Traveling Scholarship Program. While traveling extensively throughout Southeast Asia and India, Johnson was drawn to Tibetan Thangka paintings, ideas of simultaneity, and the order of space in which everything appears at once on a two-dimensional surface. Moreover, she spent a month in Venice, Italy studying space in Tintoretto at the Scuola di San Rocco.

Contact Johnson at her website.

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