Jasper Johns Hon RA was born in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia, and raised in South Carolina. He began drawing as a young child and studied art at the University of South Carolina for three terms before moving to New York in 1948, where he briefly attended the Parsons School of Design. After serving two years in the army during the Korean War, stationed in South Carolina and Sendai, Japan, he returned to New York in 1953. He soon became friends with the artist Robert Rauschenberg, the composer John Cage and the choreographer Merce Cunningham.

In 1958, gallery owner Leo Castelli discovered Johns while visiting Rauschenberg’s studio and gave Johns his first solo show. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the founding director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, purchased three works from this show. Jasper Johns has since held solo exhibitions around the world, at institutions including The Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Kunstmuseum Basel; and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Johns currently lives and works in Connecticut.

Among a number of awards, Johns won the Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale in 1988, the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo in 1993 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. Jasper Johns was made an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1989. The monographic exhibition Jasper Johns: ‘Something Resembling Truth’ opens at the Royal Academy in September 2017.