In a candid interview with Brainard Carey of the Yale University, artist Anna Johnson opens up about the concepts, process, and ambitions behind about the first solo exhibition at Kutlesa New York.
Positioned between post-impressionist sensibilities and lyrical colour field painting, Anna Johnson's practice resists linear narratives of art history, proposing abstraction as a concentric condition that folds time, influence, and gesture into a single field. In Nuage et Vide, visual languages collapse: atmospheric lightness meets geological density, gesture merges with memory, and surface becomes both image and terrain. Working directly onto raw, unprimed linen without preparatory structures, Johnson pushes, disperses, and absorbs pigment by hand, creating compositions where edges bleed and reform to generate a tension between figure and ground, depth and flatness.
Positioned between post-impressionist sensibilities and lyrical colour field painting, Anna Johnson's practice resists linear narratives of art history, proposing abstraction as a concentric condition that folds time, influence, and gesture into a single field. In Nuage et Vide, visual languages collapse: atmospheric lightness meets geological density, gesture merges with memory, and surface becomes both image and terrain. Working directly onto raw, unprimed linen without preparatory structures, Johnson pushes, disperses, and absorbs pigment by hand, creating compositions where edges bleed and reform to generate a tension between figure and ground, depth and flatness.
May 20, 2026
