Jasper Johns, Flag, 1958, Pencil and graphite wash on paper, 8 7/8 x 12 in. Collection of Barbara Bertozzi Castelli. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photo: Jamie M. Stukenberg / Professional Graaphics Inc., Rockford, Illinois

CHICAGO.-One of the most important and prolific American artists of the 20th century, Jasper Johns is best known as the creator of the flags, maps, targets, and alphabets now recognized as iconic modern American works. Not surprisingly, Johns is also one of the most studied American artists, the subject of exhibitions and books as well as a major influence on artists, writers, and composers. But despite all of this scrutiny, a signal aspect of his production has never before been the subject of an exhibition—his use of the color gray. Gray is just as central to his work as targets and flags, and it has been a consistent thread in his practice for decades. Johns has worked through all of his series in gray; he produced many paintings only in gray; he translates paintings from color into gray; he experiments with gray materials such as Sculp-metal, lead, and silver; and he worked from gray paintings to color versions of the same theme.

Jasper Johns: Gray, which open at the Art Institute of Chicago, is a radical new take on the work of an American master. Viewers of the exhibition will see, for the first time, how gray functioned for Johns over time as its own material, as a philosophy, as a mood, as a concept or indication of a concept. They will also see the wide range and mood of Johns’s gray—warm and cold, light and dark, disciplined and lush, closed and expansive—across many different media. The exhibition, consisting of 138 works—including paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings—encompasses all periods of Johns’s production, beginning in 1955 and running up through the present, including several works never publicly exhibited before. Jasper Johns: Gray sheds light on an aspect of the artist’s career that has been hiding in plain sight for decades.
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Jasper Johns, False Start, 1959, Oil on canvas, 67 1/4 x 54 in. Kenneth and Anne Griffin. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photo: Jamie M. Stukenberg / Professional Graphics Inc., Rockford, Illinois