JASPER JOHNS

A few weeks shy of 81, Johns says he’s pretty much the same person he’s always been, beginning with his bleak childhood in South Carolina, where he was shunted from relative to relative, and his arrival in New York City at the age of 19, determined to become an artist. “There was a lot of desire,” he says, “and a lot of ineptitude.”That last bit has surely changed. One of contemporary art’s great masters, he remains a vital practitioner. The past decade has proved an unusually fruitful late period. First came his “Catenary” series of paintings, grey canvases with strings slung between points, and on May 6 he will debut a batch of new sculptures at the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York’s Chelsea

-Financial Times
April 29 2011