Last summer Damon Johnson was left for dead. But he didn’t die, and he was left with paper and pen to tell the tale. In August he bought a box of Sharpies and a notebook and turned on his vintage boombox. The result is Left for Dead, a series of works on paper that are rawer than anything he’s done before. Faster, more honest, more personal. To the tunes of Tupac, Guns n’ Roses, 70s Soul, and even John Cougar Mellencamp, Damon “sampled” his way through comic books, textbooks, old school hip hop, and Playboy centerfolds. He spliced these samples with his signature skulls, dripping hearts, jagged crowns, clenched fists, evil eyes, femme fatales, and bottles of booze. The mix tape he’s created isn’t just surface. Beneath the comic book characters, there’s a serious story. Together, the drawings form a kind of graphic novel – or graphic diary – because in Left for Dead, Damon samples life: struggle, survival, and success. A recent series of large, brightly colored paintings in acrylic and spray paint on canvas complements the black and white drawings. Still full of his familiar faces and tension, these “radiant jewels”, as Johnson sometimes calls them, look like polished gemstones next to the raw uncut energy of the drawings, the final, living product of a journey that starts when you’re Left for Dead.

Left for Dead is Damon Johnson’s first exhibition with BENT. The exhibition will take place on the ground floor of 263 Bowery, a new building designed by world-renowned architect Karl Fischer, in the heart of the Lower East Side gallery district.

Damon Johnson was born in New York City and received his B.F.A. from New York University in 2000. Johnson counts comic books among his biggest influences, and “samples” from them in a manner similar to hip-hop music. Johnson has made use of found materials in street art experiments he has created since the 1990s, and has specialized in mural painting, including commissions for the nightclubs Quo, Retox, and Webster Hall, and also for Surf Lodge in Montauk, and the U.S. OPEN Tennis Championships. He has been profiled in Forbes Magazine, Trump, and the New York Times, among others, and his work is in the permanent collection of the Patterson, Hamilton, and Chelsea Art Museums. Johnson has been the subject of over a dozen solo shows in New York and abroad. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

BENT was founded in 2010 to connect new artists to new audiences. BENT presents exhibitions in alternative spaces in New York City and breaks down the barrier to the art world by integrating art and nightlife.