Johnson Lowe Gallery Winter Exhibits (fridays)

From the venue:

Spittin’ Image

Jimmy O’Neal
21 February 2025 - 29 March 2025

Johnson Lowe Gallery is pleased to present Spittin’ Image, an exhibition of new paintings, drawings and installations by Atlanta-born, Savannah-based artist Jimmy O’Neal, on Friday, February 21, from 6:00 - 8:00 PM. This exhibition marks O’Neal’s first presentation with Johnson Lowe Gallery.

The origins of the idiom “spitting image” or “spitten image” have long sparked debate, with theories ranging from “spit and image,” possibly referencing divine creation, to “splitting image” or even “spirit and image.” While these threads point to the idea of likeness, they fail to grasp the complexities of representation in a hyperreal age, where the boundaries between image and reality blur into simulacra. It is here that the concept of hyperreality, as defined by Jean Baudrillard in his philosophical treatise, Simulacra and Simulation, offers an illuminating lens. Hyperreality suggests that the boundary between the real and the simulated has dissolved so thoroughly that what we now perceive as “real” is a simulation in itself. In this world, AI, media, and technology begin to not only mimic reality but to reshape it altogether. This notion of the blurred lines between the real and the simulated is cheekily in conversation throughout Jimmy O’Neal’s exhibition. The artist’s practice has, since the 1990’s, explored AI and other cutting-edge technologies as a mirror of the society that created it, a reflection of our collective consciousness and beliefs. This reflection often stretches across the digital, dreamlike, and physical realms—creating a space where our perception of reality is in constant flux.

exhibition page here

Made in Space: Paintings from 1992 -2001

Herbert Creecy
21 February 2025 - 29 March 2025

Johnson Lowe Gallery is pleased to present Made in Space: Paintings from 1992 -2001, a solo exhibition of never-before-exhibited works by Herbert Creecy. On view from February 21, 2025 – March 29, 2025, the exhibition highlights a selection of paintings from 1992–1997, a period in which Creecy pushed his process into new conceptual and material territory. Made in Space offers a rare look at the artist’s late explorations with polyurethane transfers and air compressors, revealing a body of work where spatial fragmentation, levitation, and architectural form converge.

For half a century, Herbert Creecy worked at the edges of recognition, a prolific and restless painter who stayed in the South while the center of critical discourse remained elsewhere. His canvases—layered, scraped, collaged, and often monumental in scale—were never fixed things. They were built up, broken down, and reassembled in a process that felt equal parts instinct and strategy. If his early works, with their fingerpaint-like squiggles, were collected by the Whitney, the Corcoran, and the High Museum, it was because they slotted neatly into the wider history of American postwar abstraction. But Creecy was never interested in slotting in. From the Shakin’ Shanties of the ’80s to the cannibalistic, self-consuming collages of the ’90s, each series fed off the last, absorbing and repurposing past gestures until the work, and the artist, collapsed under the weight of constant reinvention. He produced over 3000 paintings, but for all their ambition, they remained largely underexamined. The research simply never caught up to the work.

exhibition page here