This week, New York gallery Dernier Cri presents CASEY JOHNSON | PRIMARY FORMS, a solo exhibition of new sculpture by artist and designer Casey Johnson. The exhibition brings together a new body of work that returns Johnson to the origins of his creative practice, exploring form, material and intuition through works that move between the organic and geometric, figurative and abstract, raw and refined.
Although Johnson is widely known for his sculptural furniture, sculpture predates, and in many ways gave rise to, his work as a furniture designer. With a background in art, he didn’t initially set out to become a furniture maker. Instead, he saw functional objects as another way to investigate form.
“I just thought I was making sculpture that had a function,” says Johnson. “Furniture became an extension of my love for form.”
In PRIMARY FORMS, Johnson turns his attention from function to a more intuitive exploration of form. The work plays with the push and pull of elevating and excavating, both literally and figuratively. Wood remains at the center of Johnson’s practice, and the exhibition incorporates pine, maple, reclaimed oak and walnut alongside stack-laminated plywood and black Valchromat, reclaimed steel tubing and natural stones. Guided by intuition and inspired by nature, hand carved textures contrast with smooth surfaces creating areas of changing light and shadow. Handheld objects, both found and carved, are given tiny shrine-like homes in monolithic forms. Goddess stones, shaped by time and water, are enlarged in figured maple as wall works to emphasize their inherent beauty and natural energy.
“These new forms play in ambiguity, as they are both organic and geometric, figurative and abstract, raw and refined, masculine and feminine,” says Johnson. There is something primeval about the approach yet contemporary in its final form. I like playing with opposites; texture and smooth, hills and valleys, structure and freeform, light and dark. I find that there is poetry in the tension.”
“Casey’s furniture has always had a powerful sculptural presence, so I was fascinated to learn that sculpture was actually the starting point rather than an evolution of his furniture practice,” adds Michael McGraw, founder of Dernier Cri. “With Primary Forms, we get to see him remove the requirement of function and follow form wherever it takes him. The work feels elemental and instinctive, but also very considered. The tension is what makes these pieces so compelling.”
For Johnson, the distinction between furniture and sculpture ultimately lies less in visual language than in intention. Both begin with the same considerations of line, shape, form, tone, texture, color and space, but sculpture allows him to relinquish the practical questions inherent in designing something meant to be used.
“The drive behind it feels so basic and primary that my rational mind is sometimes at odds with the process,” Johnson continues. “Sculpture is an intuitive process and requires fully investing your senses. It’s listening to your gut. It’s primal and sometimes it doesn’t make rational sense.”
That idea gives PRIMARY FORMS its title. The exhibition is both an exploration of elemental forms and a return to something primary in Johnson himself: making without a prescribed function, client or destination. As Johnson puts it, “I have found that I make sculpture for me, and that I make furniture for others. There is joy in both.”
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