LONDON, June 08, 2015 — /REAL TIME PRESS RELEASE/ — One of America’s most interesting contemporary artists is to receive his first major European exhibition at a new gallery that focuses on cutting-edge, avant-garde art. Raven Row is a non-profit contemporary art exhibition centre in Spitalfields that is housed within two eighteenth-century merchants’ houses integrated with new galleries and its next exhibition, Larry Johnson: On Location runs from 11 June to 9 August 2015. It is directed and funded by Alex Sainsbury of the Sainsbury family, whose family have funded many great art projects in London, such as the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery. Raven Row is a very different enterprise, offering thoughtful shows on lesser-known artists and allowing visitors to explore the fascinating quarter of Spitalfields. The area is filled with fashionable boutiques, great shops and cool bars and restaurants. To explore its attractions, see LondonTown.com, where you can also find the latest room rates for hotels in London.

On Location brings together a selection of works by Larry Johnson from the early 1990s to the present. The show’s uncontested star is Los Angeles, the city in which Johnson has lived and worked all his life. For over thirty years, LA’s physical and imaginary appearance has served as the set for the artist’s photo-based investigations of the glamour industry, replete with fading stars and premature deaths. Johnson’s work bears the marks of a generation of artists sampling readymade images and texts to create seductively laconic pictures. Yet the colourful sheen of Johnson’s photo-based works is also a foil for sexual, political and semantic tension. The artist’s pictures are encryptions of a Hollywood demi-monde, referring to the cultures from which his work emerges – queer, political, filmic and theoretical.

The exhibition is curated by Los Angeles-based writer Bruce Hainley, and by Antony Hudek, Curator and Deputy Director of Raven Row. Commie Pinko Guy, a publication edited by Hainley with new essays by Morgan Fisher, Lisa Lapinski, Hainley, Hudek and Wayne Koestenbaum, as well as reprints of classic underground queer writing, will accompany the exhibition. For more information on this and other exhibitions in London’s cutting-edge contemporary art scene, see LondonTown.com.

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