Verdure swirls through the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum. The plants hang into the void, as if a tornado had picked them up towards the sky and blocked them in the air. We, the creatures linked to the earth, ride on the ramp, observing the garden hanging from various angles, framed by architecture and refracted by the multifaceted work on the walls. The initial impression of chaos approved by the storm dissipates, replaced by an orderly procession thanks to the abundant imagination of Rashid Johnson and an erratic career.
Born in Chicago in 1977, Johnson became famous for the first time for the photographs he produced at the age of 21, a series of technically accomplished close -ups. If the Guggenheim had limited his retrospective to these images and the complex and in layers that he started to assemble around 2018, the show would have been a study in Brilliance.
Instead, it is a show that also covers years of research, conceptual co -gation and dead ends pursued by an artist who did not always trust his talent and who suffered his instinct to please. The result is A poem for deep thinkersAn exhibition that is strongly attractive and often frustrating and opaque, wrapped in jargony abstractions.
Johnson's early breakthrough has been a set of hyper-traditional photo portraits made with a 19th century printing process known as Van Dyke Brown, which makes reality in terrestrial color monochrome and extremely fine details. In “Michael” and “Jonathan's Hands”, both in 1998, he zooms in on men who protect themselves from the intrusion of the objective.
Jonathan presses his knotted fingers on his face, letting the camera fix on the grooves with which time marks the body. Michael, his eyes closed, tilt his head back and lifts his chin in a pose that evokes ecstasy, exhaustion or even martyrdom. Traces of suffering mix with fluid beauty in these images, and when Thelma Golden, director of Harlem Museum studio, selected them for her 2001 group influential FreestyleThey obtained Johnson a coveted place in the hierarchy of the art world.
Even while collectors caught up his first public work, he went to almost poetic abstraction. In “Manumission Papers (in circles)”, bare printing forms closed patterns on a soil with shades of dirt, which suggests that the release of slavery involved other forms of servitude. To make the dispersions of tiny white shadows in a series entitled “Chicken and watermelon seeds: African-American experience in abstract art”, Johnson has placed granules on photosensitive paper before exposing it to light, so that the recording of their presence can be read as an absence. Photographers such as Man Ray and Robert Rauschenberg had experienced similar techniques, but Johnson's images give off a distinctive compound of nostalgia, elegance and historical sorrow.
But the subtitle of the series, which reads as a conference journal, alludes to a concern of the university world, and Johnson moved away from success to register for a master's degree in Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Thus began a period in the sterile desert of conceptual art, when he raised irony and self-awareness above aesthetics.
In a nervous provocation, he posed for a color “self -portrait with my separate hair like Frederick Douglass” (2003). It is a brilliant gadget, and it makes Johnson look like a model in a male magazine than an intellectual force behind the fight for civil rights. He also extended through the tomb of Jack Johnson, the first boxing champion of black heavyweights. This 2006 photograph is another piece of self-aging humor: the artist as an effigy of himself, forward above his own family name carved in stone.
The desire to be a protagonist as well as the author led him in the ways of self. One of his best known video works, “Me, Tavis Smiley and Shea Butter”, perched it on the toilet, tightening Goop on his skin and listening to a talk show on national public radio. There is not much, and there is not much to look at, but the opportunity obviously means a lot for him. “That's what I am, and it's incredibly contemporary and it's incredibly complicated, and I thought it was this really honest moment,” Johnson told an interviewer.
From this moment, he regularly used shea butter in his sculpture, smoking, sculpt, trace or melt the things, and leave it occasionally in uninined lumps. He offers a historic pedigree for his use: Joseph Beuys, who used beef fat in his performance, and Bruce Nauman, who, in his series “Art Makeup” (1967-68), applied pigments assorted to his face and his body.
Shea Butter and Johnson's face are two of the recurring elements that are going through a discontinuous career, unifying methods and disparate styles. He often returns to materials that have the appearance of dark skin and hard experience, such as black soap mixed with melted wax, or scarified and brand wood. House plants are now living in his work for decades, generally accommodated in a large grid structure, such as a cross between a ball and a horizon line. The strength of the Guggenheim exhibition lies in its ability to present Johnson's zigzag through the phases as an organic evolution, a process of growth and connection.
But at certain times, the artist seemed to challenge this interpretation – as in his brutal turn towards an oversized abstraction with the “cosmic slops” of 2008. Johnson placed wooden panels on the ground and coated with soap and melted black wax. Then he raised them, allowing the pigment to flow into expressively random models. Sometimes he scored them with a stick. It is difficult to focus on individual work through the forest of allusions to Ad Reinhardt, Jackson Pollock and Frank Stella. Ambitious but inert, they aspire to more importance than they deliver it, and it is necessary a prodigious strabismus and an act of faith to nod with the head of text elucidating “the alchemy of materials which have a meaning for the daily life of blacks in the world”.
The “Cosmic Sols” process, however, had the happy effect to return Johnson to a more intuitive and less ironic art form. Beauty has signaled. And, in 2018, he found it in a set of large -scale collages on the theme of “Escape”. The oozing black ghosts cross a landscape of African masks, palm trees and jungle. You can choose solidity and refuge whispers in architecture allusions: the harlequin patterns of square bathroom tiles and oak floor lengths. You could call this Johnson White lotus Period, when the caregited tropical fantasies are filled with threat and the sensual indulgence creates an essential friction with death.
Until January 18, 2026, guggenheim.org
Find out first of all our latest stories – Follow the FT weekend on Instagram And XAnd register To receive the FT weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
