Night watch

Johansson Projects presents Night watch, a striking exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Gregory Rick that boldly reimagines history painting through the fractured lens of contemporary life. Apocryphal yet deeply referential and incisive, Rick’s compositions collapse past events with biblical and mythological imagery, art-historical allusions, and capitalist spectacle into hypersaturated scenes that are at once facetious and unsettling. A burning cross, a feline maw, a tree of serpents, and tigers charging toward machine-gun fire populate a world where violence–and communal acts of resistance–appear both ancient and immediate. Figures clad in Fila jackets, yellow Hokas, and other recognizable markers of contemporary consumer culture anchor these frenetic compositions in the present. As a veteran, citizen, and subject, Rick draws upon collective memory to confront the cognitive dissonance of navigating everyday life amid recurring cycles of violence, surveillance, and oppression. In works such as Night watch (We got us), Rembrandt’s civic militia meets Picasso’s Guernica, transforming the historical tableau into a contemporary cry for help and vision of mutual aid. A few of the works are painted and collaged on silk mesh, their transparencies exposing the layers of their construction and underscoring history itself as an unstable, assembled narrative. In Night Watch, Rick contends with what it means to stay woke and on watch in the 2020s.