Michael Johnson (born 1938) (Horizon Line), c.1999

Michael Johnson (born 1938) (Horizon Line), c.1999 oil on canvas 122.0 x 366.0cm (48 1/16 x 144 1/8in). Footnotes: PROVENANCE Corporate Collection, Sydney, commissioned c.1999 THIS WORK CAN BE VIEWED IN OUR MELBOURNE GALLERY By the late 1990s Michael Johnson had achieved considerable success, both critical and commercial. A turning point in his career followed his shift in medium in the late 80s. Abandoning the use of acrylic paint that had lent itself to his hard-edged works of the 60s and 70s, Johnson began exploring the lusciousness and fluidity of oil paint. Committed to abstraction, the enormous task that Johnson set himself was the creation of work within a context both Australian and international. 'Through the semiotics of colour, and through that alone, a viewer can infer Johnson's bohemian, cosmopolitan and anti-protestant characteristics and a good deal else about his personality and life's experience. We can also gauge the breadth of his ambition' His work reveals a man of more than average sensuality, who has a lust for experience, is uplifted by beauty, and is much more sceptical than he'd admit about our puritanical equations of truth and ugliness, rectitude and austerity 'We encounter a productive contradiction throughout Johnson's work between his 'purism' and his hedonism. Like Matisse, he stages a showdown in almost every painting he tackles.'1 It is this 'showdown', manifested in the consuming, remorseless energy of his work, which has secured Johnson his place in the pantheon of Australian painting. In his foreword for the 2004 publication 'Michael Johnson', Edmund Capon observed, 'Michael Johnson's work is indisputably abstract and yet the line and the mark, both processes of definition are fundamental. His work of the last two decades has been characterised by powerful moods of texture and colour articulated by lines. Beneath those threading, sometimes rambling, sometimes emphatic lines of unrestrained untainted colour, moves a convulsive world heaving with layers of paint that are rich with experience and resonate with emotion. They are, as they live and breathe, a culmination.'2 1. Terence Maloon, 'Introduction' in Michael Johnson paintings 1968-1986, University Gallery, University of Melbourne, 1986 2. Edmund Capon, Michael Johnson, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2004, p. 15 For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com For further information about this lot please visit the lot listing