Opening this summer, Rashid Johnson’s exhibition ‘Sodade’ takes over the entire exhibition galleries at Hauser & Wirth Menorca in the sensitively repurposed outbuildings of an 18th century naval hospital. For his first solo exhibition in Spain, the renowned contemporary American artist continues to work with a complex range of iconographies to explore collective and historical expressions of longing and displacement, while speaking to the times we live in.

‘Sodade’ is the title of a Cape Verdean song from 1950s, popularised by Cesária Évora, that narrates a profound emotional state of longing on ‘the long way’ to São Tomé. Originating in the Portuguese ‘saudade’, the term signifies a feeling of melancholy and missing, and becomes hybridised in the Cape Verdean use with a shift in the spelling. In ‘Sodade’, Johnson continues to draw from critical history and narratives around migration and journeys, with a similar gesture of hybridisation.

The exhibition presents a newly developed series of bronze sculptures and Seascape paintings, alongside Bruise Paintings and Surrender Paintings, the latter of which is the latest offering to evolve from the iconography of his long-established Anxious Men series. The works are accompanied by the Education Lab, which provides a creative learning programme for diverse audiences throughout the duration of the exhibition.

Capturing both subjective and collective historical states in real time, the artist has pivoted the Anxious Red paintings iconography, which portrayed crowds of bright red faces, to Bruise Paintings and Surrender Paintings in hues of blues and whites. Johnson selects his typical materials and tools – such as shea butter and black soap – for the importance of their historical narratives. Here he has chosen to use the canonically significant, and universally recognisable, medium of oil paint in order to communicate his message all the more urgently.