Anna Johnson: NERAM Museum

In her first solo museum exhibition at the NERAM Museum in Australia, Anna Johnson presents a contemporary adaptation of Monet’s late large scale masterpieces: the Nymphea. Her choice of these epic murals forms the basis of her colourist and colour field abstract practice. The title Nymphaea Nymphaea alludes to mirrored duality as does the deliberate use of light and shadow in these works created solely for this exhibition.

Anna Johnson (British, b. 1966) studied English, Australian literature and Fine Arts at the University of Sydney graduating with a bachelor of arts in 1987. The following year she was appointed Art Editor of Interior Design magazine. Since then, Johnson has been a professional art writer and author contributing to Vogue (UK and Aus), Vanity Fair, Conde Nast Traveller, The Sydney Morning Herald and as a senior arts writer for Artist Profile Magazine. She is the author of several monographs and has been a critic for both television and radio.

Holding many detailed artist interviews, provided an immersion in contemporary art three decades deeper than a conventional art school education. Raised in New York in the early 70s, time in her father's loft studio on the Bowery, as well as the artist enclaves at Max's Kansas City and Fanelli's Bar in Soho had a formative impact. Making the gallery rounds each Saturday as a small family, laid the foundations of a lexicon steeped in both Colour Field and Lyrical abstraction. Establishing her own full time studio practice in 2017, three solo shows in Sydney followed. Johnson's distinct griffe strikes a different chord to the dominant animism of Australian painting. Seven visits to Japan over the last decade, inspired her austere and symbolic use of space. The subtle rituals and expansive space within Heian screens, and calligraphy have been fused to a hyper-sensual use of colour.

Her consuming project ongoing are the 'Nymphaea Nymphaea' paintings, works that speak directly to the expansive and progressively minimal paintings of the late and post-Impressionists. As her works grow larger and more complex the scope of creating an entire environment without spatial periphery is approached