April 16 - May 24, 2025
From Moody Gallery:
“Moody Gallery is pleased to announce Paintings & Drawings, an exhibition of work by Lucas Johnson (1940-2002). The subjects in Johnson’s work are always from his imagination, shaped by his love of the ocean, his awe of nature, and most of all, his humanism. Walter Hopps, the Menil Collection’s founding director, described Lucas as an imagist, a term he defined as “art that employs recognizable images in fantastic or unreal juxtapositions … constructed in the same way as poetry, using imagery as visual metaphors.”
Lucas Johnson was born in Hartford, Connecticut, raised in southern California, and died in Houston, Texas. He never took formal art classes and taught himself to draw and to paint. In the 1960s he moved to Mexico City and was more interested in the human condition than the prevailing Minimalist and Conceptualist movements in the United States at that time. Johnson began to exhibit in public cultural institutions as well as galleries and was represented by Galeria de Arte Misrachi in Mexico City and David Gallery in Houston. After moving to Houston in 1973, he was represented by Covo de Iongh (1976-78) and currently by Moody Gallery (1975-present).
Johnson’s work can be seen in many collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Menil Collection, Houston Airport System, Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Art Museum of South Texas, San Antonio Museum of Art, Wichita Falls Museum, Amarillo Art Center, New Orleans Museum of Art, New Mexico Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian Institution, and the Brooklyn Museum. His work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions including at the Serpentine Gallery, London (1987), the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Galveston Arts Center (1994), Art Museum of Southeast Texas and Art League Houston (1996), Museum of East Texas (2001), Rockport Center for the Arts (2004), Station Museum (2005), Shenzhen Art Institute, Shanghai, China (2016), and many institutions in Mexico.
In 2006 the Houston Artists Fund published the book The Art and Life of Lucas Johnson with a preface by Walter Hopps, an essay by art historian Edmund P. Pillsbury, and chronology by Patricia Covo Johnson, which is available at Moody Gallery. “
2815 Colquitt Street
Houston, 77098 TX
(713) 526-9911
Get directions