Celia Johnson: invisible thread

EXHIBITION DATES: September 3 - 28, 2024

RECEPTION: THURSDAY, september 5, 5 - 8 PM

The Painting Center is pleased to present Invisible Thread featuring new works by Celia Johnson. This solo exhibition will be on view in the Project Room from September 3 – September 28, 2024. This is Celia’s second participation in an exhibition at The Painting Center.

Several of the new works included in this exhibition were conceived and created by Celia during the progression of her close friend’s terminal illness through 2023 and into 2024. This friend ultimately and unbelievably succumbed this past April to cancer. A gifted painter, she had been a significant influence, support and creative touchstone for Celia who was newly establishing her painting practice in Connecticut after having spent a decade in North Carolina.

Celia dedicates the work here to her friend’s memory and to the enduring invisible thread between them.

This body of work furthers Johnson’s exploration of geometric-biomorphic components within her layered vocabulary of abstraction. The more overtly kinetic, haptic, juxtaposed forms of her previous work are here comparatively composed and seemingly at rest. The tableaux evoke an introversive meditation in search of equilibrium and balance. Johnson’s deft handling of layered, fluid paint provides a subtly nuanced secondary level of movement, rewarding the careful observer.

The subdued palettes and infinite greys emerging in this collection are a visceral reaction to the beauty of the winter of 2023, counterpointed with its grave undercurrent of alarm for her friend. As these muted colors persevere throughout the collection, they are punctuated with veiled glimpses of pure color, as in the lifting of clouds.

Celia Johnson received a BFA from California College of the Arts and an MPS from NYU, Tisch School of the Arts. She also studied painting at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie. Past residencies include the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and The Sam & Adele Golden Foundation. Johnson’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including venues in Paris, New York City, North Carolina, Connecticut, Australia and Germany. In 2020, she was one of five painters honored as "North Carolina Women Abstract Painters” and in the same year was counted among 25 artists whose work was included in a survey exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC. Johnson has exhibited at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, New York, the Hidell Brooks Gallery in Charlotte, NC, and the Chester Gallery in Chester, CT. Works by Celia Johnson can be found in several private collections as well as in the corporate collection of Credit Suisse, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Celia Johnson currently lives and works in Ivoryton, CT. 

For more information on the artist, visit: https://www.celiajohnson.net/ or @_celiajohnson_.