The Artwork of the Month – Rashid Johnson – Untitled Anxious Drawing (2016)
We are pleased to present this month Untitled Anxious Drawing (2016), a singular and deeply compelling original work on paper by Rashid Johnson — one of the most critically acclaimed and institutionally consecrated American artists of his generation, whose practice stands at the intersection of abstraction, cultural memory, and the lived experience of Black identity in contemporary America.
Part of Johnson's celebrated Anxious Drawings series, this work belongs to one of the most psychologically charged and intimate bodies of work in his entire output. Executed in oil on cotton rag paper — a support prized for its tactile richness and archival integrity — the drawing channels a raw, urgent mark-making that resists the composed distance of Johnson's large-scale installations, working instead at the most immediate register of hand and surface. The result is a work of striking emotional directness: a visual field in which anxiety, self-examination, and the weight of history converge in a gesture at once controlled and unguarded.
Johnson has described anxiety as both a personal and collective condition — one inseparable from the broader history of Black American experience, from the negotiation of identity across social and cultural boundaries, from the demands of aspiration and the persistence of trauma. In Untitled Anxious Drawing, that meditation finds its most compressed and intimate form. The work does not illustrate; it enacts — oil on paper as the site of an inner reckoning, signed and dated as testament.
Coming directly from Hauser & Wirth, New York — the world's most commercially significant contemporary art gallery and the primary institutional champion of Johnson's work — this work carries a provenance of the highest gallery distinction, attesting to both its impeccable authenticity and its place within the most rigorously documented chapter of the artist's career. Johnson's work is held in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and has been the subject of major solo exhibitions across the United States and Europe.
Measuring 61 × 45.7 cm (24 × 18 in.) and presented framed, the work is in good condition, with faint undulation throughout the surface — a natural characteristic of oil on cotton rag paper, attesting to the authenticity and material presence of the piece. A full condition report is available upon request.
Untitled Anxious Drawing (2016) represents a rare opportunity to acquire a unique, signed, and fully documented original work by one of the defining voices in contemporary American art — from a series of exceptional rarity and critical standing, and with a provenance that could not be more authoritative.
The artwork is shipped worldwide from France with professional packaging, full insurance, and tracking, ensuring a secure and seamless acquisition.