RASHID JOHNSON
Exhibitions · Spain
Rashid Johnson Brings the Weight of Longing to Menorca
In his first solo show in Spain, the artist turns a former naval hospital into a meditation on migration, memory, and the ache the Portuguese call saudade.
There is a word in Portuguese, and in its Cape Verdean cousin, that does not translate cleanly into English. Saudade. Sodade. It sits somewhere between homesickness and grief for something you may never have had at all, a longing so specific it became the title of a song, and now the title of an exhibition.
Rashid Johnson borrows that word for Sodade, his first solo exhibition in Spain, opening across the galleries at Hauser & Wirth Menorca. It is a fitting home for the work: the space occupies the sensitively restored outbuildings of an 18th-century naval hospital, a building that has already lived through centuries of arrivals and departures.
Johnson, born in Chicago in 1977, has spent two decades resisting easy categorization. He came up through the photography department at the Art Institute of Chicago before his practice widened into sculpture, painting, drawing, film, and installation, each medium another way of pressing on the same questions of identity, inheritance, and history. Sodade continues that inquiry, but turns it specifically toward the experience of migration: the boats, the crossings, the people who leave and the people who wait.
The Seascapes
The heart of the show is a new body of work Johnson calls the Seascape Paintings, shown here alongside a series of boat sculptures. The method has roots in earlier pieces like his Cosmic Slop works, where he carved directly into black soap and wax. This time, he coats a finished canvas entirely in Neutral White or Prussian Blue oil paint, then wipes and scratches the surface away, pulling rough, repeating shapes out of the wet paint that read, unmistakably, as rowboats.
Row after row, the boats repeat across the canvas until the pattern starts to feel less like a fleet and more like a rhythm, the same gesture made over and over, the way a worry gets turned over in the mind. It is a quiet kind of image, but not a peaceful one. Something in the repetition suggests both the possibility of escape and the isolation of being adrift, the boats never quite landing, never quite alone either.
Johnson has talked before about what he wants a painting to do, describing it as less a finished statement than an opening. He has called the surface a kind of soapbox, a platform where an idea can be handed to someone else and left there for them to work out. The image is the way in. What a viewer does once they're inside is up to them.
"There's a generation of Black artists before me who made work specifically about the Black experience. For my generation, having grown up in the age of hip-hop and Black Entertainment Television, there's less of a need to define that experience so aggressively to a white audience. It's not a weapon for me, it's more of an interest." Rashid Johnson
That distinction matters for how Sodade reads. Johnson isn't building an argument so much as holding open a space for a feeling that a lot of people recognize but rarely see named: the specific ache of distance, whether from a homeland, a history, or a person. In pairing the Cape Verdean sodade with the paintings' scratched, half-erased surfaces, he lets that feeling stay a little unresolved, the way longing usually does.
A Hospital Built for Kings, Reopened for Art
The setting is doing real work here too. Hauser & Wirth Menorca sits on Illa del Rei, the Island of the Kings, in the harbour at Mahón. It occupies the site of a grand, once-crumbling naval hospital that the English built in the 18th century. Since opening to the public on 19 July 2021, the site has grown into a full art centre: galleries, an education lab, a restaurant, gardens, and a small boutique, spread across a building that spent centuries treating sailors far from home before it ever hung a painting.
"We hope that the intimacy and magic of this place are transported to the people who visit," Iwan Wirth has said of the outpost. It is hard to separate that hope from the choice of artist. A building shaped by arrivals, departures, and long waits for news is not a neutral backdrop for an exhibition about longing; it functions almost like a second collaborator. The restoration itself leaned toward preservation over renovation, keeping the naval hospital legible within the gallery, so that Johnson's boats float, quite literally, inside a structure once built to receive people who had crossed the sea.
Menorca marks a genuine first for Johnson in Spain, and it lands at a moment when his reputation as one of the defining American artists of his generation is well established. What Sodade adds isn't a departure from that body of work so much as a deepening of it: a specific, hybridized word standing in for something almost everyone has felt and almost no language names precisely.
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