Anna Elise Johnson
Anna Elise Johnson was born in 1983 in Starnberg, Germany to Mary and Roger Hayden Johnson. She was raised in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Johnson has exhibited her work in numerous exhibitions across the United States as well as internationally in Italy, Germany, England, India, and Slovenia and has a piece in the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas.
On growing up with a world-renowned artist as her father, she says, “I wasn’t one of those kids who drew all the time. I was more of an inventor/ alchemist/ artist, putting together assemblages and using unusual materials. Through art school, I continued to experiment and push ideas forward, and even when I made oil paintings, I was driven to use the traditional medium in ways that felt new.” She seeks to create artwork that transcends the limits of our time. She says, “Trying to find a balance between material and conceptual investigations has led me to make some unusual, and I hope original, artwork.”
Anna Elise Johnson received her BFA from Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri in 2005 and subsequently her Masters of Fine Art from the University of Chicago in 2012. Her main areas of focus were painting and art history. After completing her BFA, Johnson took a leap and moved to Berlin, Germany at the age of 24. There, she spent a few years working as an artist assistant for Julie Mehretu, whose work is shown in major museums throughout the world. She credits Mehretu as one of hre most important mentors. After completing her MFA at the University of Chicago, Johnson was a fellow at the prestigious Core Program in Houston, Texas. She spent several years teaching art at Rice University in the city as well. She now lives and paints in Los Angeles, California.
Johnson’s collections span from paintings to process driven, environment-based works in mixed-media. In her paintings, she uses multiple methods to layer and juxtapose images from different places and times in order to disrupt how we see those images. She states, “This layering inspires beautiful color and generates an intersection of spatial arrangements and temporalities.” Rather than describing a singular moment in the scene, this body of work incorporates the time that it takes to create the paintings and through dramatic shifts in form, color and light it connects them to historical art movements. Her mixed-media works serve as records of the places in which they were created, off-the-grid locations people seldom visit. Interestingly, these works contrast with her paintings in that they are moments frozen in time. They hang as abstracted, highly textured pieces that subtly tell the earth’s story.
