Jasper Johns at the PMA

I recently visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and I was very intrigued by one particular artists’ work: Jasper Johns.

The collection that is currently at the PMA is a curation of some of Jasper’s work since 1974. A few of the pieces are pictured below.

What intrigued me most about his work is how he challenges the viewer’s expectations for what art is and what a medium is. He challenges our expectations of material by making light-bulbs out of lead. We question the function of color in art when he uses a single gray shade on the entire canvas. He makes us second-guess the two-dimensional form by creating layers of images, distorting the canvas, and often even attaching three-dimensional objects to the surface of the canvas.

In his work, you can see how he takes the concepts of process and experience – that is the process of making the art, the experience of creating something – and puts it into dimensional, tangible forms.