Simen Johan will celebrate the launch of his self-titled third monograph published by powerHouse Books on Tuesday, June 20th at 6:30 PM. The artist will be joined in conversation by curator, writer, and collector W.M. Hunt, with a book signing to follow. The event is hosted by Scandinavia House and is organized jointly with the Royal Norwegian Consulate, New York.
Simen Johan’s new volume represents 15 years of the artist’s career. Gathered here for the very first time in this deluxe volume are his celebrated uncanny animal portraits, otherworldly landscapes, and psychologically-charged narrative natural scenes, many from his significant series Until the Kingdom Comes. Johan’s portraits, landscapes, and narrative works unite to construct a metaphorically dense world where, as in our own, roles are adopted, dramas unfold and the distinctions between reality and fantasy dissolve.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Simen Johan (b. 1973; Norway) originally drew attention in the early 1990s by merging digital manipulation with traditional darkroom techniques. Since then, he has developed a hybrid form of image-making, integrating candidly photographed animals and landscapes with modest studio and location setups. The artist travels near and far to photograph his source material, finding inspiration anywhere from the local zoo to the jungles of Costa Rica or the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest. Countless hours are then spent assembling disparate images into a unifying whole as he edits, composes, and populates each mise-en-scène. The resulting photographs often lack a sense of place which, for Johan—who was born in Norway, raised in Sweden, and moved to New York City at age 19—somehow feels like home. Each image reveals poetic and often unexpected relationships that speak to the illusory and multifaceted nature of existence. Tensions between what is revealed and what is concealed, what is alluring and what is menacing, what is fact and what is fiction, both shape and unsettle the scenes. Johan presents us with paradoxical photographic worlds that echo uncanny versions of our own.
Simen Johan has exhibited widely across the globe, including at the 21c Museum, Louisville, KY; Ciurlionis National Art Museum, Lithuania; Fotografiska, Stockholm, Sweden; and Center for Photography, Ykatinburg, Russia. Johan’s work is held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Cleveland Art Museum, OH; Museum of Fine Art Houston, TX; Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada; and the Denver Art Museum, CO, among others. The artist is the recipient of the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Grant for Photography, Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant, American-Scandinavian Foundation Grant, MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Simen Johan was born in Norway in 1973, raised in Sweden, and has resided in New York City since 1992.
