Whitehot Recommends: Mitchell Johnson exhibiting 18 large scale paintings in San Francisco.

   Mitchell Johnson, “Tokyo,” 2012-2014, 78x120 inches, oil/canvas 

Large New England Landscapes (Selected Paintings 2008-2025)

425 Market Street, San Francisco / January 4–April 3, 2026

Giant Abstract and Landscape Works (Selected Paintings 2012-2025)

555 California Street, San Francisco / January 11–April 10, 2026

Two of San Francisco’s skyscrapers, 425 Market Street and 555 California Street, will host public exhibitions of large scale works by Mitchell Johnson. At 425 Market Street the exhibition focuses on New England where Johnson has been making regular painting trips since 2005. Views include Cape Porpoise, Maine and Cape Cod. At 555 California Street eleven, 78 x120 inch canvases, show the breadth of Johnson’s work. “Race Point Bench” 2025, inspired by DeChirico and Morandi is installed alongside the abstract work “Tokyo,” 2012-2014. In a very meta moment, the 555 California exhibit will feature two SF cityscapes which incorporate 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. We experience the convergence of representation and abstraction in his newest work. He has moved on from representational and figurative paintings, to pure abstraction, and then too, to a merging of both; an ongoing marriage of architectonic motifs in each. Flat color and simple sharp geometry, yet lyrical and painterly, declare what he is seeing and what the scene demands. His travels in other parts of the world, his visualization of differing topographies, inform many of his paintings. His work affects our equilibrium, which all art ought to do.”

 Mitchell Johnson “Race Point Bench,” 2025, 78x120 inches, oil/canvas

More recently, Lee Roscoe, wrote in Artscope Magazine in 2021:

“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.

 Mitchell Johnson “From 450 Sutter,” 2012, 78x120 inches, oil/canvas

A 1,400 word 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, March, 2026.

More information is available at www.mitchelljohnson.com.

Digital catalog by request: mitchell.catalog@gmail.com

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