This bright image depicts to anxious faces carved out of black soap. The two heads are stacked and are on colorful tiles.

Rashid Johnson

Color Men, 2015 exudes a raw immediacy with its wild and agitated rendering as Rashid Johnson’s scrawled faces emerge from the thick impasto. The body of work titled Anxious Men, portraits made of black soap and wax, began in 2015 for the artists solo exhibition at the Drawing Center in New York. Johnson described the making of the portraits as a cathartic process by which he was able to explore his own fears and anxieties, the notion of black identities, and the ongoing dialogue between figuration and abstraction.

Johnson’s engagement with and treatment of materials is deeply engrained within the history of painting. Scratching and scraping, spreading and scoring, he creates a dense, variegated surface from which his Color Men emerge. Reminiscent of the “Art Brut” aesthetic popularized by Jean Dubuffet nearly a century ago, Johnson’s portraits are deliberately visceral and rudimentary in appearance. A champion of “anti-art”, Dubuffet believed his works were embodiments of emotion and instinct, as exemplified in his powerfully charged portraits carved from a mixture of oil, sand and rock. Like Dubuffet, Johnson’s portraits are primitive and filled with an undeniable urgency, necessitated by the rapidity with which the black soap and wax dries. The resulting wide-eyed subjects in Color Men express the realities of confronting contemporary America and reflect the artists own anxieties at large.

Currently, a major retrospective titled Rashid Johnson – A Poem for Deep Thinkers is on view at the Guggenheim Museum in New York through January 18, 2026

 

Rashid Johnson

Color Men, 2015
Spray enamel, black soap and wax on ceramic tiles, mounted on panel
72″ x 50″

Provenance

Hauser and Wirth, New York
Private Collection, Los Angeles
Christie’s, New York, July 10, 2020, lot 109, estimate $200,000-300,000, sold for $447,000
Private Collection, Michigan, acquired from the above sale