LARRY JOHNSON: UNTITLED
GALERIE BUCHHOLZ, is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Larry Johnson.
January 23 - March 07, 2026
I’d wanted this to be more fun and less pedagogical (I’m not sure that’s quite the word). I’d wanted to link Frost and Defrost to The Other Side of Aspen and especiallyThe Other Side of Aspen 2, which gave Kurt Marshall his place in the sun - in no small part because of how Buren’s work opens a dossier on “fronts” and “backs” as well as on relations between “inside” and “outside” information. I’d wanted to say something about men so covered in cum that parts of them are frosted. But then I had trouble remembering how I first heard about the Buren panels.
I know it occurred in the 2000s, early in the years Larry and I were teaching together at Otis - classes on Elizabeth Taylor, on the Hollywood musical, on juvenile delinquents, among other matters. Somehow I had construed that a student of ours, the artist Mark Roeder, had not quite discovered them but instigated a conversation about them. To clarify some points, I wrote to Mark, and he responded: . I came across the panels because I was bored and nosey. I did a work-study job in the Otis Gallery. I only worked Saturdays. It was always empty. There was nothing to do but read. I had a photocopied version on For Publication, the second edition published by Marian Goodman. It had the Otis publication information in it too. The file cabinets were unlocked so I just went looking.
I was looking for anything about the Dan Graham exhibition. I spent lots of time sifting through those files. There was so much happening there in the 1970s. Hal Glicksman was the curator then. I think he moved on to Cal State Long Beach or maybe the Long Beach Museum. I met him at a John McCracken show at PACE or ACE or maybe at LA Louvre. I think that was in 2001. He was into using computers for kids with disabilities, I think. In the gallery files, there was a lot of correspondence. Most of it was about funding. Lots of postcards from Dan. The file for Buren’s exhibition was pretty bare. I took notes about some of what was there. I’ll look for that notebook. There were two copies of the Buren catalog. […] There isn’t much to it. Description, sketch, work in progress documentation. Buren dedicates the work to Christopher D’Arcangelo, who committed suicide sometime after the exhibition.
At some point while I was snooping through all this stuff I talked to Larry about it. He told me he took a stack of the panels from the old Otis campus before the move. That place has a habit of throwing out important stuff. I know when the gallery closed in 2020, they just threw out a lot of the gallery materials.
I photographed it the same day he gave it to me. He told me he wanted to give one to me and I knew what I wanted to do with it for a few weeks before he brought it to me. It just seemed right. I also wanted the Blondie album Parallel Lines but couldn’t find a copy at the time. Ebay was brand new at this time. So I made my own. I didn’t want the photograph to seem nostalgic or illustrative of something. I was thinking about parallelism and repeating or reproducing. My thinking at the time, and often continues in this way, is something like do this, then do the same thing and see what’s better or what happens or what to stop.