Curated by Clifford Ackley and Patrick Murphy
Featuring just under two dozen works, the Museum of Fine Art’s upcoming exhibition will present a tightly focused look at five decades of Jasper Johns’s probing of the interplay of sign, process, and device.Highlighting the artist’s diverse and often elaborate efforts in printmaking, “Picture Puzzles”—assembled from private collections and the MFA’s own holdings—will also include a small sampling of drawings and sculptures and a copy of Foirades/Fizzles, the 1976 artists’ book Johns made in collaboration with Samuel Beckett. Spanning from Johns’s early gridded and layered numbers of the 1960s to the 2010 etching and aquatint Fragment of a Letter—based on an excerpt of a van Gogh missive and rendered in both stenciled type and American Sign Language pictographs—these puzzles compose a half century’s exploration of the complexities not just of image making but of representation itself.
