Rae Johnson, Night Games at the Paradise, 1984. Oil on canvas, 84 x 132 in. (213 x 335.28 cm). Courtesy Christopher Cutts Gallery.
Christopher Cutts Gallery
21 Morrow Avenue
Toronto, Ontario
Date
This selection of paintings from 1979 to 2019, all by Canadian Rae Johnson, represents some of the artist’s key figurative works over nearly 40 years. Originally slated to end April 18, the exhibition remains open for the time being by appointment only, or online.
Editors' Comment
It feels like since I started writing about art in Canada in the early to mid-oughts, I’ve heard repeated refrains that there are few effective methods, tools or resources out there for comprehensively communicating histories of contemporary (and even historical) Canadian art. And even though I work for an organization that seeks to provide just such a resource, I feel that that has, in some ways, just given me an even greater sense of these slippages or gaps. So I’m not surprised, largely, to have rarely heard of Rae Johnson’s work before encountering this exhibition online. But given the strength, scale and themes I see in her work, I guess I’m still given to a bit of shock upon digesting, even from a distance, this survey. It shows Johnson was a significant femme painter creating large-scale canvases in the 1980s in Toronto and New York, and from what I can tell from the catalogue, her oeuvre is still well worth learning about today. Kudos to Christopher Cutts—and of course, the artist herself—for resurfacing these canvases at this time. More information is also available in Nadja Sayej’s recent interview with Johnson for Forbes. —Leah Sandals