Jasper Johns: Night Driver

Curator: Enrique Juncosa
Sponsored by: BBVA Foundation

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Jasper Johns: Night Driver, an ambitious retrospective dedicated to one of the most celebrated artists of our time. The exhibition is sponsored by the BBVA Foundation, a Strategic Trustee of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao since 1997.

Night Driver takes is entitled after a 1960 drawing by Johns, described by the artist as his first work based on a personal feeling. The show features nearly 140 works, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, an artist’s book, and a stage design. The pieces are organized chronologically, reflecting Johns’s repeated return to certain themes. In this presentation, paintings and sculptures are shown separately from works on paper.

Jasper Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1930 and grew up in South Carolina, where he was raised before continuing his studies in New York. In 1953, he moved to New York, where he soon formed close friendships with figures such as artist Robert Rauschenberg, composer John Cage, and choreographer Merce Cunningham. Together, they would reshape the artistic landscape of their country. 

Between 1954 and 1955, Johns destroyed his earlier work and painted his first American flag, marking the beginning of a series of iconic works that feature signs and flat elements—numbers, letters, targets, and maps—drawn from everyday, recognizable imagery and widely regarded as precursors to Pop Art. When these works were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958, they brought him immediate recognition, and the Museum of Modern Art acquired three of the works on view. 

Between 1950s and 1960s, Johns was also in contact with Marcel Duchamp, whose work and thinking would have a defining influence on his practice. The exhibition then moves into the 1970s and 1980s. Here, Johns develops abstract compositions built from crosshatched patterns of strokes, alongside pieces rich in visual references to artists of different periods. Also included are the series devoted to the four seasons, as well as a group of images in which Johns depicts a woman’s face, with eyes, nose, and lips drifting toward the edge of a rectangular field. The exhibition concludes with a selection from the 1990s and 2000s, where the artist returns to some of his best-known themes while continuing to explore new ideas, as in the Catenary series.

Far from Expressionist rhetoric, Johns’s oeuvre is defined by an ironic, restrained approach that nonetheless carries emotional weight and is widely regarded as a forerunner of Minimalism and Conceptual Art. Although often interpreted allegorically, his work is rich in biographical references, though not always immediately apparent, as well as philosophical ideas and metalinguistic reflections. Despite this intellectual, at times hermetic dimension, the artist does not renounce the power of images or of painting itself.