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9+ Iconic Jasper Johns Target Paintings & Prints

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jasper johns target with four faces

9+ Iconic Jasper Johns Target Paintings & Prints

This 1955 painting depicts a standard archery target overlaid with four plaster casts of human faces, arranged in a row across the top. The work combines recognizable imagery with abstract expressionist influences, blurring the lines between representation and abstraction. The encaustic technique, using pigmented beeswax, lends a textured, almost sculptural quality to the surface.

The piece is significant within Johns’ oeuvre and the broader art historical context for its challenge to conventional notions of art. By utilizing commonplace objects and recognizable forms, the artist questions the very definition of art and the relationship between image and object. The work anticipates Pop Art’s embrace of popular culture while maintaining a connection to Abstract Expressionism’s focus on surface and process. It raises questions about perception, identity, and the nature of seeing, prompting viewers to reconsider how they interpret familiar symbols.

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9+ Iconic Jasper Johns Target Plaster Casts & More

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jasper johns target with plaster casts

9+ Iconic Jasper Johns Target Plaster Casts & More

American artist Jasper Johns frequently incorporated commonplace imagery, such as flags, maps, and targets, into his work. His series of target paintings and sculptures, some incorporating casts of body parts made from plaster, represent a significant departure from Abstract Expressionism, the dominant art movement of the time. These works challenge traditional notions of representation and meaning by blurring the lines between painting and sculpture, and by presenting familiar objects in a new and thought-provoking context. The incorporation of plaster casts adds a layer of tactile, three-dimensional reality, juxtaposed against the flat, graphic nature of the target motif.

These works are significant for their contribution to the development of Pop Art and subsequent art movements. They anticipate the focus on everyday objects and the questioning of artistic conventions that characterized later artistic developments. The use of readily recognizable imagery, combined with Johns’s innovative techniques, helped pave the way for a new understanding of artistic subject matter and its relationship to the viewer. The plaster casts add a further layer of complexity, introducing elements of the human form and suggesting a connection between the symbolic target and human experience.

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8+ Jasper Johns' Iconic Target Paintings & Prints

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target by jasper johns

8+ Jasper Johns' Iconic Target Paintings & Prints

Jasper Johns’s iconic paintings of targets, first appearing in the mid-1950s, represent a pivotal moment in American art. These works, with their instantly recognizable concentric circles and flat planes of color, challenge traditional notions of representation and abstraction. By depicting a commonplace object already imbued with symbolic meaning, Johns questioned the very nature of art itself, prompting viewers to consider the relationship between image and object, perception and reality. A typical example features a standard archery target rendered in encaustic, a mixture of pigment and beeswax, lending the surface a textured, almost sculptural quality.

Emerging during the rise of Abstract Expressionism, these works offered a radical alternative to the gestural, emotionally charged canvases of the era. Johns’s focus on familiar imagery prefigured the Pop Art movement, while his exploration of semiotics the study of signs and symbols anticipated later conceptual art practices. The inherent duality of the targetboth a symbol and an object in itselfallowed Johns to explore the interplay between painting and sculpture, representation and abstraction. This artistic innovation established his importance as a key figure in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art and beyond.

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