BAROMETRIC

Anna Johnson
 

This body of work was seeded by a potent visual memory. Crossing the Pont du Carousel in 2019, I encountered a vast body of cloud: blue-grey like granite, it hung like an inverted mountain over the rooftops of the Louvre. Baroque, absurd, yet real. With the gnarled swirls of a thermal map, the storm cloud drained all sense of gravity by swallowing the horizon. Whole.The heft of this image never left me. Instead it became an iteration that has continued to mutate; forming a strong basis for the engulfing voids and convex architecture of my compositions. My use of geometric space carries the memory of this form, both weightless yet leaden. The impact of a top heavy mass has influenced the way my paintings are built. The challenge of each composition is the fusion of dissonant, almost impossible contrasts compressed into a single plane. Something heavy that is etheric. Something joyous dogged by shadow. These paintings summon the swell and arc of barometric energy. As I painted, I thought about atmospheric pressure: collective, social, psychological and, above all, sensory. Weather is no longer a benign commonality, it is instead, a mounting chain of 'events'. The terror of a quicksilver sky is that it cannot be out-run. It is the same with my own symbols, forms and colours that surface again and again over time. Before these works, the depths and recesses of my colour offered hiding places, often I saw them as caves. Some paintings bear an aerial perspective, others appear submerged, almost subterranean. Across all my work, the impulse to float and dissolve into light persists. The exercise of painting from a sensate memory has been a process both relentless and diffuse. Pure colour blows open both the enclosure of the field and shatters the claustrophobia of physical reality. It is my literal eye of the storm.

- Anna Johnson

Anna Johnson is an Australian artist whose practice is informed by an esteemed career in arts writing, authorship and criticism. Born in London and raised between Sydney and New York, Johnson spent her formative years in New York in the 1970s, immersed in the city’s influential art scene. Bringing decades of critical engagement with art into her studio practice, Johnson turned her full attention to painting in 2016, establishing a significant new chapter in an already distinguished career. She is represented by Kutlesa in New York and Goldau, Switzerland, and her work is held in major private collections with a blue-chip focus across Australia and internationally. Johnson’s work has been presented institutionally at the New England Regional Art Museum (NERAM), Armidale, in 2025 and her work will also be showing at Untitled Art, Miami Beach with Kutlesa, in December, marking an expansion of her international exhibition profile.