JASPER JOHNS (B. 1930)
Untitled
signed and dated in ink 'Jasper Johns '13' (lower right)
offset lithograph on Giama Natural paper
15 x 11 inches (38.1 x 27.9 cm)
Executed in 2013. This work is from an edition of unknown size plus 32 artist's proofs. Co-published by Art in America and Sharon Coplan Hurowitz. Printed by Universal Limited Art Editions, Inc., at Official Offset, Amityville, NY.

Originally inserted in the May 2014 issue of Art in America, not included in this lot. This work is sold unframed.

PROVENANCE:
Universal Limited Art Editions, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner

NOTES:
Born in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns is widely regarded as one of the most influential American artists of the 20th century. Emerging in the 1950s alongside Robert Rauschenberg, Johns helped usher in a new era of postwar American art by rejecting the gestural intensity of Abstract Expressionism in favor of symbols, systems, and familiar imagery. Throughout his career, Johns has explored repetition, perception, and the relationship between visual signs and meaning, often using encaustic, printmaking, and collage as core mediums of inquiry.

Executed in 2013 and published the following year as a special insert in Art in America, Untitled revisits three of Johns’ most enduring motifs: a map of the United States, the numerical sequence 0–9, and the American Sign Language alphabet.

Held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Untitled (2013) stands as a potent late-career meditation on language, geography, and the coded systems that structure American life.