Mitchell Johnson: Two San Francisco Exhibitions of Large-Scale Paintings
The Bay Area artist opens 2026 with “Large New England Landscapes (Selected Paintings 2008-2025)” and “Giant Abstract and Landscape Works (Selected Paintings 2012-2025).”
Two of San Francisco’s skyscrapers are hosting public exhibitions of large-scale works by Mitchell Johnson. Large New England Landscapes (Selected Paintings 2008-2025), on view at 425 Market Street, focuses on New England, where Johnson has been making regular painting trips since 2005. The paintings mostly reference Cape Porpoise, Maine; and Cape Cod. At 555 California Street, Giant Abstract and Landscape Works (Selected Paintings 2012-2025) features 11 78 x 120 inch canvases, including the brand new “Race Point Bench” (2026) inspired by Giorgio de Chirico and Giorgio Morandi, as well as “Tokyo” (2012-2014), made after several trips to Japan. The 555 California show will also feature two San Francisco cityscapes, which include the building itself.
Joan Ludman, the author of Fairfield Porter: A Catalogue Raisonne of His Paintings, Watercolors, and Pastels, wrote about Johnson’s work in the 2014 monograph, Color as Content:
“Color, color relationships, pattern and form are the hallmarks of Mitchell Johnson's achievement. Contemplating the growth and movement of his efforts over the years, we experience his intent, instinct and intuition. We become aware of his affinities with Morandi and Albers, and with Bonnard, Vuillard and Fairfield Porter. Johnson has remarked that he tries to "combine Morandi's feeling for composition with Albers' intelligence about color." And he exhibits an inspirational and perhaps emotional relationship with the work of Fairfield Porter.”
More recently, in a 2021 article for Artscope Magazine, Lee Roscoe wrote:
“Indeed, color and shape seem to be the point rather than the subjects themselves. The houses and landscapes Johnson paints are, in a way, excuses to express colors. One wonders, is he suggesting our world is just color and form? And yet those colors and forms evoke the essence of place: his European vistas are somehow, well, so European. His vistas of New York, are utterly New York; those of San Francisco as from Russian Hill, could only be San Francisco. So, too, his Cape Cod vistas essentialize the Cape.”
An article on Johnson by Susana Byers, “Seeing Paintings Instead of Locations,” appeared in American Artist Magazine in 1997 and included Johnson’s own explanation of his process:
“Every element in a painting must work in terms of composition and color,”…“My somewhat abstract interpretations of the landscape and people in outdoor scenes are the result of this belief; the painting has to function as a painting. For instance, when I depict a tree against a sky, there has to be both value and color tension between the two elements. I focus on color, texture, and placement as much as image. If one of these aspects, even in a single tree, doesn’t work, I’ll scrape off the paint and start over again-just as quickly as if the entire view had failed to come together.”
Mitchell Johnson’s paintings are in 700 private collections and the permanent collections of 40 museums. His work has been the subject of two museum retrospectives. An exhibition of his small paintings will be on view in Paris at Galerie Mercier this March.
For more information, visit mitchelljohnson.com and follow him on Instagram: @mitchell_johnson_artist.
Request a digital catalog by emailing mitchell.catalog@gmail.com.
