2025 Gala Auction - Live Lot
Rashid Johnson | Katharina Grosse | Jose Alvarez (D.O.P.A.)
Kibong Rhee | Joel Mesler
Rashid Johnson
American, born 1977
Soul Painting "The Haunted Melody," 2024
Oil on linen
48 x 36 x 1 5/8 in. (121.9 x 91.4 x 4.3 cm)
Framed: 50 x 37 5/8 x 2 1/2 in. (127 x 95.6 x 6.4 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth © Rashid Johnson
Estimate: $500,000 - $700,000
Soul Painting "The Haunted Melody" is a painting from Johnson’s highly anticipated 2024 Soul Painting series. Building on his celebrated Anxious Men, Seascape, and God paintings, the Soul Series continues Johnson’s physical explorations of the self through mark-making. The painting exemplifies the artist’s longstanding investigations into animism, the belief that all things, including inanimate objects, have souls.
The "Soulscapes" contain the almond-shaped vesica piscis — an ancient symbol which, when halved, appears as both a vessel and an opening eye, a transitional space and opening to the mind.
Johnson radically engages with the surface of the canvas using a combination of oil paint and oil sticks to build dense layers of material using his hands and other unorthodox tools. He is able to manipulate and carve into the paint, documenting his fluid gestures.
For more information, please email [email protected]
This lot will be auctioned live at the Gala on February 1, 2025. To register an absentee or phone bid, please email [email protected]
About the Artist:
Born in Chicago in 1977, Rashid Johnson is among an influential cadre of contemporary American artists whose work employs a wide range of media to explore themes of art history, individual and shared cultural identities, personal narratives, literature, philosophy, materiality, and critical history. Johnson received a BA in Photography from Columbia College in Chicago and studied for his master's at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Johnson's practice quickly expanded to embrace a wide range of media — including sculpture, painting, drawing, film making, and installation — yielding a complex multidisciplinary practice that incorporates diverse materials rich with symbolism and personal history. Johnson's work is known for its narrative embedding of a pointed range of everyday materials and objects, often associated with his childhood and frequently referencing aspects of history and cultural identity. Many of Johnson’s more recent works delve into existential themes such as personal and collective anxiety, interiority, and liminal space.
Recent solo exhibitions include: ‘Seven Rooms and a Garden. Rashid Johnson + Moderna Museet’, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, 2023; Rashid Johnson. Nudiustertian, Hauser & Wirth, Hong Kong, 2023; The Chorus, The Metropolitan Opera, New York NY, 2021; Summer Projects. Rashid Johnson, Creative Time, New York, NY, 2021; Rashid Johnson. Capsule, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada, 2021; The Crisis, Storm King Art Center, New Windsor NY; Rashid Johnson. Waves, Hauser & Wirth, London, UK, 2020; the touring exhibition Rashid Johnson. The Hikers at the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen CO, the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico and at Hauser & Wirth, New York, 2019; Provocations. Rashid Johnson, Institute for Contemporary Art, Richmond VA, 2018; Rashid Johnson. No More Water at Lismore Castle Arts, Lismore, Ireland, 2018 and Rashid Johnson. Hail We Now Sing Joy at The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City MO which traveled to the Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee WI, 2017.
2025 Benefit Auction - Live Lots
Rashid Johnson | Katharina Grosse | Jose Alvarez (D.O.P.A.)
Kibong Rhee | Joel Mesler