False Start

Mediums: oil, canvas.
Location: private collection.

The most expensive painting by the artist, for which an unknown collector paid $ 80 million in 2006. In this painting, the artist used words – names of flowers, which he applied to the canvas using a stencil. The main idea of the work is to show that words are just a set of characters, and they are meaningless without the meaning that a person puts in them. Johns deliberately painted over the colour names with inappropriate paint: blue for green, red for yellow, etc. This discrepancy makes you think about the conventionality of some things and our habit to trust them without hesitation during the whole life.