Half a century after Jasper Johns first unveiled his crosshatched paintings at Leo Castelli Gallery, the series is returning to center stage. On January 22, 2026, Gagosian, working with Castelli Gallery, will open a landmark survey of these works at its longtime 980 Madison Avenue flagship, where the exhibition will remain on view through March 14.
The show marks the 50th anniversary of the crosshatched paintings’ debut in 1976 and nods to another historical hinge: Gagosian inaugurated the Madison Avenue space in 1989 with an exhibition of Johns’s “Map” paintings.
The show gathers rarely seen paintings and drawings made between 1973 and 1983—works that reshaped Johns’s practice. Loans come from major American museums and private collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Broad, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Johns himself will lend significant works from his personal collection, some returning to New York after years on long-term institutional display.
Johns’s shift to the crosshatch motif in 1972 was a surprising turn for an artist known for reworking everyday symbols—“things the mind already knows,” as he described it. The new compositions were more cryptic that the work that made him famous: parallel strokes arranged in repeating bands of color using collage, acrylic, oil, watercolor, ink, encaustic, and sometimes even sand.
Among the key works on view are paintings from the “Corpse and Mirror” series (1974–84), the Picasso-inflected Weeping Women (1975), and Dancers on a Plane (1980–81), Johns’s tribute to choreographer Merce Cunningham. The exhibition also brings together all six “Between the Clock and the Bed” paintings (1981–83), his conversation with Edvard Munch’s late self-portrait, offering a rare chance to see the full cycle in one place.
Gagosian will publish a catalog to accompany the exhibition, featuring essays by Roberta Smith and Carlos Basualdo, co-curator of a Johns retrospective staged simultaneously at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in 2021–22.
