10/6/2015
Larry Johnson
Raven Row, London
On Location. Major survey in Europe: works from the early 1990s to the present
The exhibition brings together a selection of works by the artist (born 1959, Long Beach, California) from the early 1990s to the present. The show's uncontested star is Los Angeles, the city in which Johnson has lived and worked all his life. For over 30 years, L.A.'s physical and imaginary landscape has served as the set for the artist's photo-based investigations of the glamour industry, replete with fading stars and premature deaths. Johnson's style bears the marks of a generation of artists sampling readymade images and texts to create seductively laconic surfaces. Yet the colourful sheen of Johnson's pictures are encryptions of a Hollywood demi-monde, referring to the cultures from which his work emerges-queer, political, filmic and theoretical. Curated by Los Angeles-based writer Bruce Hainley, and by Antony Hudek, Curator and Deputy Director of Raven Row.