Michael Johnson
NSW b.1938
Untitled
Acrylic on canvas
274 x 411 cm
BCEC Art Collection
Michael Johnson is one of Australia’s most celebrated artists, known for his vibrant abstract compositions. Emerging from hard‑edged abstraction in the late 1960s, his work gradually evolved into a more painterly language, where luminous colour fields are overlaid with gestural marks.
Influenced by European modernism and abstract expressionism, he treats colour as the primary vehicle of meaning, using it to evoke elemental forces such as sea, sky and darkness without depicting them directly.
Johnson exhibited in The Field, a seminal exhibition of Australian abstraction at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne in 1968 and has exhibited regularly ever since. In 1989, his work was the subject of a survey exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Untitled can be viewed on Plaza Level.