DIFC · Dubai
Artists, curatorial team, advisors, and partners connected to Volery Gallery.
Represented and guest artists exhibiting with the gallery.
Represented Artist
Aaron Johnson was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1975 and lives and works in Brooklyn. He holds an MFA from Hunter College, New York, 2005. He works on the floor — pouring and staining raw canvas with washes of acrylic pigment, letting gravity and intuition guide what emerges. Figures appear from the flow of paint: ethereal, eerie, charged with what Johnson describes as the cosmic and the animistic. His influences stretch from Helen Frankenthaler and Rothko on one end to the Hairy Who and James Ensor on the other, with a persistent curiosity about astrophysics and mysticism running through everything. The work has been shown at MoMA New York, Mass MoCA and the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, and internationally at Almine Rech (Brussels, Paris, Shanghai), Marlborough Gallery, Over The Influence (LA), AishoNanzuka (Hong Kong), Gana Art (Seoul) and Gallery Poulsen (Copenhagen). His work is held in the permanent collections of MoMA New York, the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation in Los Angeles and Coleccion Solo in Madrid. He is the recipient of the MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the Yaddo residency and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program residency. Floating at Volery Gallery in 2026 was his first presentation in the Gulf.
