Moderna Museet

In the exhibition Seven Rooms and a Garden, the work of American artist and filmmaker Rashid Johnson is in conversation, confrontation and at times collusion with the collection of Moderna Museet. Each room in the exhibition – and a garden – stages an encounter based on the personal, political and art historical relationships that unfold in his practice.

Rashid Johnson (b. 1977, Chicago, USA) is recognised as one of the most influential artists of his generation. In his paintings, sculptures, films, performances and photographs, he draws from his own biography, as well as numerous art and cultural histories, to reflect on the human condition at a time of great upheaval.

Abstraction as a source of life

For Rashid Johnson, abstraction is a source of life. In his Bruise paintings or the more recent God series, both of which are included in the exhibition, the abstract painterly mark is an expression of a spiritual or psychological journey. His monumental installation Home (2023), made especially for this exhibition, is an abstract self-portrait that uses shea butter sculptures, books and the growth of plant life to lend form to Black intellectual and cultural histories. Or the abstract gesture occurs through subtle interventions, from rearranging the architecture of Moderna Museet to introducing images, sounds and scenographies that reset how we experience the space of art and the museum.

In all the works and interventions in Seven Rooms and a Garden, Johnson explores the gesture of abstraction as an art historical lineage, a political necessity or a personal appeal.

The exhibition as a home

The space of the home is an important source of inspiration for Johnson, and serves as a model for Seven Rooms and a Garden.

Johnson says: “I’ve always been interested in the domestic. And kind of hijacking things that we’re familiar with and essentially occupying them.”

His recent film Black and Blue (2021), which features prominently in the exhibition, is a case in point. Mainly situated in the artist’s home, the work depicts the life of the protagonist, played by Johnson himself, as he goes through his daily routines of eating, driving, exercising, spending time with his family and sleeping. A tension is felt in Black and Blue between what is public and private, what is familiar and unknown, what is expected and what actually occurs. In this unconventional self-portrait, Johnson returns the gaze to the intimate endeavours of being human.

The artist’s home in Black and Blue is expanded in the exhibition to seven rooms and a garden – an interior of Rashid Johnson’s practice, with artists in Moderna Museet’s collection as likely and unlikely inhabitants.