Half a century after Jasper Johns first showed his crosshatched paintings at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1976, they're coming back to New York. On January 22, 2026, Gagosian will open a major survey at its Madison Avenue flagship—the same space where the gallery inaugurated itself in 1989 with Johns's Map paintings. It's the kind of full-circle moment that art history sometimes offers: a single artist, a single motif, threading through decades.
The exhibition gathers rarely seen works made between 1973 and 1983, a decade when Johns fundamentally shifted his approach. Before the crosshatches, he was known for painting everyday symbols—flags, targets, numbers—"things the mind already knows," as he put it. The new work was stranger. Parallel strokes arranged in repeating bands, layered with collage, acrylic, oil, watercolor, ink, encaustic, sometimes sand. The compositions were cryptic where his earlier work had been direct.
A Conversation Across Decades
The loans span major American museums—the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art—plus Johns's own collection. Some of these works are returning to New York after years in institutional storage, which alone makes the show a rare gathering. Key pieces include the Corpse and Mirror series (1974–84), the Weeping Women paintings (1975), and Dancers on a Plane (1980–81), which Johns made as a tribute to choreographer Merce Cunningham. Perhaps most striking: all six Between the Clock and the Bed paintings (1981–83), his extended conversation with Edvard Munch's late self-portrait, will hang together for the first time in years.
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Start Your News DetoxWhat's notable about this moment isn't just that museums are willing to loan major works or that Johns himself is contributing pieces. It's that the crosshatch paintings—once seen as a departure, even a puzzle—have become central to how we understand his entire practice. They're not a detour. They're the thing itself.
Gagosian is publishing a catalog with essays from art critic Roberta Smith and Carlos Basualdo, who co-curated the Johns retrospective at Philadelphia and the Whitney in 2021–22. The exhibition runs through March 14, 2026.
