NEW YORK, NY.- Matthew Marks is presenting Jasper Johns: New Works on Paper, now on view at 526 West 22nd Street. The exhibition includes eighteen drawings and seven prints made over the past two years.

Johns employs a wide range of media in his new works on paper including oil, acrylic, graphite, watercolor, charcoal, and oil stick. Many of the drawings include a new image for Johns based on a map entitled “Slice of the Universe,” a copy of which the astrophysicist Margaret Geller sent to the artist in 2018 after seeing an earlier painting of his incorporating an image of a swirling galaxy. Johns has overlaid the red, blue, and green dots in the map, which represent neighboring galaxies, on top of an abstract pattern based on one of Leonardo’s knot drawings. All these drawings relate to Johns’s latest painting titled Slice, 2020 included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s concurrent survey of the artist’s work.

A variety of other subjects also appear in the new works, some for the first time, including drawings after a Japanese Shunga print, William Blake’s painting The Ghost of a Flea, and a drawing of a knee by a high-school student named Jéan Marc Togodgue from Cameroon that Johns saw in his orthopedist’s office.

“As one gets older one sees many more paths that could be taken,” Johns has explained, “Artists sense within their own work that kind of swelling of possibilities, which may seem a freedom or a confusion.”

Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, the most comprehensive exhibition of his work to date, opens September 29 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Jasper Johns: New Works on Paper is on view at 526 West 22nd Street through October 30, 2021, Tuesday through Saturday, from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM.