Flags, 1987. Encaustic and collage on canvas. 65.5 x 83.8 cm. Artist’s collection © Jasper Johns, VEGAP, Bilbao, 2026
Like many people, my first exposure to Jasper Johns was his flags. In Flag, Jasper Johns transformed one of the most familiar national symbols into something unsettlingly ambiguous, forcing viewers to confront whether they are looking at a representation or the thing itself, and, more importantly, what the American flag actually signifies, revealing it instead as a double-edged emblem capable of standing equally for patriotism and for the masking of oppression and uneasy political realities at least that’s how I always saw it. For me, as an American, this kind of iconology has never sat comfortably; the stars and stripes have always felt less like a unifying image than a contested surface, carrying histories that resist simplification, much like Johns’ paintings.
Flashlight III, 1958 (cast in 2010). Bronze, tempered glass, and silver plating. Edition of 2 (2/2). 13.3 x 21 x 9.5 cm. Artist’s collection © Jasper Johns, VEGAP, Bilbao, 2026
The recently opened Jasper Johns: Night Driver, named after a 1960 drawing that Johns described as the first work inspired by a personal emotion, at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, is an expansive retrospective dedicated to the influential artist of the modern era. Sponsored by the BBVA Foundation, the exhibition brings together around 140 works spanning seven decades of the artist’s career, organized chronologically. As someone who only knew his flags, the exhibition offered an in-depth survey of the restless visual language that made him a defining figure of postwar American art. Having appeared on the New York art scene in the 50 working with familiar motifs and recognizable images, they have since been noted as a precursor of Pop Art.
In Memory of My Feelings – Frank O’Hara, 1961. Oil on canvas with objects (2 panels). 101.6 x 151.8 cm. Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Partial gift of Apollo Plastics Corporation. Courtesy of Stefan T. Edlis and H. Gael Neeson © Jasper Johns, VEGAP, Bilbao, 2026
Born in 1930 in Augusta, Jasper Johns spent his early years between South Carolina and New York City, where he settled permanently in 1953. There, he formed key creative relationships with figures including Robert Rauschenberg (their creative and romantic partnership became one of the most influential artistic dialogues of the postwar era), John Cage, and choreographer Merce Cunningham, collaborators who would collectively reshape the American avant-garde. Johns would later serve as artistic adviser for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1967 to 1980, deepening a long-running creative partnership that fused visual art, choreography, music, and experimental performance.
The exhibition revisits Johns’ breakthrough years in the 1950s, when he famously destroyed his earlier works before painting his first American flag between 1954 and 1955. That radical reset led to a now-iconic body of work centered on familiar symbols from flags, targets, maps, letters, to numbers, which transformed ordinary imagery into something conceptually slippery and formally radical. Throughout, the exhibition positions Johns as an artist who rejected the bombast of Abstract Expressionism without abandoning emotional depth. In his most celebrated work on display, “Painting with Two Balls,” he gives an ironic comment on the intensity of toxic masculinity. At a time when Abstract Expressionism often celebrated the myth of the heroic male artist, Johns embraced ambiguity, intimacy, and restraint instead. His homosexuality, long kept private during an era of widespread homophobia, could possibly have shaped an artistic language built on concealment, coded symbolism, and layered meaning, allowing vulnerability and intellectual complexity to coexist even though, in interviews, he never addressed this speculation. In today’s cultural landscape, where conversations around identity, gender, and representation continue to evolve, Johns’ refusal to conform to the aggressive masculine archetype of his generation positions his work as both historically radical and profoundly contemporary.
The Bath, 1988, Encaustic on canvas, 122.6 x 153 cm Kunstmuseum Basel Acquired with a contribution from the Freunde des Kunstmuseums Basel, 1988, © Jasper Johns, VEGAP, Bilbao, 2026
From there, Night Driver follows Johns through the decades, charting his encounter with Marcel Duchamp and the enduring influence of Duchampian thought on his practice. Later galleries explore the crosshatched abstractions of the 1970s and 1980s, the densely referential Four Seasons series, and works in which fragmented female facial features appear to press against the boundaries of the canvas. The retrospective concludes with pieces from the 1990s and 2000s, including the celebrated Catenary series, in which Johns continued to revisit familiar concerns while opening new conceptual avenues.
Untitled, 1992-94 Encaustic on canvas 158.8 x 194.3 cm The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection © Jasper Johns, VEGAP, Bilbao, 2026
Visiting the exhibition through my fashion lens, I can see a correlation in shaping the visual language of designers, for example Ralph Lauren, whose Americana iconography often mirrors the mythmaking of Johns’ flag works, to Maison Margiela, where the house’s numerical label system recalls his enduring engagement with numbers and signs. Could his legacy also be traced through the text-based provocations of Moschino, the Pop-inflected graphics of Calvin Klein under Raf Simons, and the conceptual American sportswear of Marc Jacobs? Decades on, Johns’ visual language continues to inform fashion’s ongoing fascination with iconography, branding, and the transformation of the everyday, even the banal, into something culturally charged.
Summer, 1985 Encaustic on canvas 190.5 x 127 cm The Museum of Modern Art Gift of Philip Johnson, 1998 © Jasper Johns, VEGAP, Bilbao, 2026
I found the most emotional dimension of Jasper Johns’ work in the final decades of his career, where the layers of ambiguity that once felt guarded seemed to. There is a striking confidence in these later works, not the confidence of certainty, but of someone no longer resisting complexity within himself. It feels important to point this out because art history so often perpetuates the myth that an artist’s greatest achievements are tied to their youth, rebellion, or early genius. For me, Johns’ later work offers a powerful counterpoint to that narrative. There is something deeply moving and genuinely hopeful about witnessing an artist continue to evolve emotionally and formally with age, producing some of his most resonant and affecting works long after the period when the art world typically expects brilliance to fade. Giving us seven decades of his life to his work is an incredible gift.
