Johnny Abrahams

Johnny Abrahams

Johnny Abrahams makes exquisite, labor-intensive, abstract acrylic-on-canvas paintings, covered edge-to-edge with endless iterations of patterned lines. Formerly a classical musician, Johnny Abrahams' bold compositions are imbued with breath and rhythm, resulting in vivid patterns and contained forms painted in clean lines and bold shades. Using a palette knife, Abrahams applies thick, layered swaths of elemental color to his canvases with oil and wax. His spare and striking compositions can evoke calligraphic forms and music arrangements. Abrahams divides his canvases geometrically, imbuing his minimalistic paintings with a sense of order while also allowing room for free-flowing interplay between form and negative space; ideas of magnification, subtraction, and perception are crucial to his practice. “Beginning each piece with a grid, I can either express that structure or divide it into smaller, increasingly intricate geometries to form a progressively finer language of elements,” he explains. “Put into high-contrast figure-ground relationships, these reduced elements become vibratory, and they destabilize the fixed gaze.” He often works in black-and-white, and with curving, zigzagging, or straight lines, creating the illusion of movement and depth on the flat, still surface of the picture plane to call attention to the process of perception. With their build-up brushstrokes and reliance on illusion, Abrahams’s canvases can call to mind the experiments of Op art pioneers such as Victor Vasarely and Carlos Cruz-Diez.

The artist studied at Evergreen State College and has exhibited in New York, London, Copenhagen, Cologne, Seoul, and San Francisco. In 2014, he was included in an exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California. With a long career ahead, Abrahams plans to explore color, shapes, texture, and space in future series, and our mind-eye-body connection to these various visual elements.

B. 1979, Tacoma, WA, USA; lives and works in London.