Seven Rooms and a Garden is the home of American artist and filmmaker Rashid Johnson. The door to this intimate setting is open and – without any expectations on our part – the host tells us: Make yourself at home. Take your shoes off. Open the fridge and help yourself to whatever you like. My home is yours also.

We follow his instructions and enter his premises, following the prior functionality of each room. Between the adjoining galleries, different layers of his personal and professional life unfold. Ultimately, this home-exhibition is a portrait of the artist: abstract, fragmented and compressed between the walls of this seven-bedroom flat with a garden. We are immersed in his domestic realm and become privy to the habits, vices and political values that underpin his daily life. We watch a vibrant visual ensemble, where his works and personal objects are put into relation with the Moderna Museet’s collection.

The chosen works allow us to get to know Rashid Johnson through third parties, in conflict and dialogue with his work. Like a self-portrait through another, Seven Rooms and a Garden entails setting the stage, a simultaneously literal and figurative gesture. The blue walls, ceilings and furniture – an allusion to the influence of blues music on his work – are an exhibition area; a stage on which the pieces of the guest artists are arranged. Meanwhile, Rashid Johnson remains offstage: stripped of his former leading role. Stepping off the stage recognises the scope of his artistic practice. The artist is already a collection of influences and, in this sense, this exhibition is also a commonplace, a crossroads between his references. The relationship between them is not, nevertheless, chronological. Far apart in time, space and form, the pieces are grouped together around the central theme of his work – abstraction.

In On the Blue Stage, the catalogue included in the exhibition, Rashid Johnson defines abstraction as a liminal state, somewhere between illegibility and the certainty that communication is effective. This definition is particularly manifest in the first gallery of the exhibition, entitled The Salon. A metallic structure on a blue stage contains countless abstract works by Asger Jorn, Barnett Newman, Rubem Valentim, Stanley Whitney, Lee Lozano and Ernest Mancoba. All these artists – without exception – voice a cry. We do not know their motivation, but we recognise the feeling inherent in it. This is an uninterrupted creative flow which makes it possible to speak the intangible and materialise the spiritual. The same could be said of God Painting “Closed Eyes” (2023), by Rashid Johnson. Punctuated by the repetitious nature of an almond-shaped form, the vesica piscis, this work reveals that abstraction is ultimately an individual meditative exercise.

God Painting “Closed Eyes”, also exhibited at The Salon, is paired with the sound of Louis Armstrong’s “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue”. This musical selection represents Rashid Johnson’s attempt to overcome the historically narrow perspective that institutions have on abstraction. Louis Armstrong – usually sidelined – is placed next to the artists recognised as canons of abstract art. The lyrics and rhythm of his music echo in the venue and emphasise the influence of music on the visual arts. The relationship between music and abstraction deepens, and will be repeatedly explored in the neighbouring galleries.

In The Bedroom, the room of this home-exhibition, jazz determines the rhythm of the images, the movement of the shapes and the vibrancy of the colours. With lights off, lying on a blue bed, we gaze at a series of compositions from Henri Matisse’s book Jazz (1947) and watch a revolving programme of films inspired by this work. On the day of my visit to the Moderna Museet, David Wojnarowicz and Marion Scemama’s When I Put My Hands on Your Body and Marlon T. Riggs’ Anthem were on show. Profoundly experimental, these films reflect on the queer body: that private space incessantly encroached upon by external projections and expectations. When I Put My Hands on Your Body, following the artist’s AIDS diagnosis in 1989, describes the desire and decay of bodies. The images – overlaid with a poetic narration – reveal his encounter with the artist Paul Smith. Under a blue light, their bodies intertwine; they merge into a single body. The film is seen as a cinematic study of intimacy, i.e., a shift from the artist’s private sphere to art institutions.

This consideration will reach its climax in the last gallery of the exhibition, where we find a group of works by Soufiane Ababri, Andy Wharhol, Cecila Edelfalk, Melissa Shook, Lena Cronqvist and Samuel Fosso, featuring multiple interpretations of the self-portrait. Compared to these differing methodologies, Rashid Johnson presents Black and Blue, a film shot in his home during the pandemic. In this classic self-portrait, we learn about the mundane details of his daily life. It fulfils the purpose of this exhibition, the home which is – first and foremost – an intimate space. This is the centrepiece of the final gallery, closing the exhibition with the assurance that the main portrait we have in our hands is that of Rashid Johnson. The question remains: Isn’t the home the most authentic reflection of who we are?

Seven Rooms and a Garden runs in Moderna Museet, in Stockholm, until September 22, 2024.