The Ulla Johnson Spring/Summer 2025 collection is a lyrical expression of pure color featuring the work of Abstract Expressionist Lee Krasner. As an artist of the natural sensations, her tones were bright, the shapes open and free. Krasner’s oeuvre captures the beauty of organic forms in nature paired with a passion for gesture and color—elements profoundly reflected in Johnson’s collections.
About Lee Krasner
A pioneer among the first generation of Abstract Expressionism, Lee Krasner developed novel approaches to painting and collage for over half a century, demonstrating an endless drive for experimentation and reinvention. Widely recognized as a central protagonist among a cohort of artists that define postwar American painting, Krasner was subject to a critically-acclaimed major touring European institutional retrospective organized by the Barbican Art Gallery in 2019–21, followed by a solo exhibition at the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum in 2023. She was subject to two touring US institutional retrospectives in 1984–85 and 1999–2001. Her work is held in premier institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.
Learn more about the legacy of Lee Krasner and work of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.
Shop the collaboration and discover more exquisite pieces from our Spring/Summer 2025 runway here.
Author Mary Gabriel delves into the shared affinities between these two women and more in On Transformation, an essay penned in celebration of our SS25 runway.
On Transformation
Those who create introduce sounds, words, and visions into our lives that have never before existed. If what they make speaks to us, it is because it is true. We recognize it immediately as part of the world we inhabit, internal and external. It is that world renewed, enriched, made intriguing again, made beautiful again. We emerge from the encounter breathless, awakened, transformed. Sometimes, if we are lucky, we are changed forever.
That is the artist’s gift to us. They open new pathways for us to travel, but more importantly, they invite us to join them in their work. By listening to a piece of music or living with a painting or wearing a designer’s creation, we become part of their story. We contribute to it by our participation. And that is what art is truly about. It is not a matter of simply knowing; it is a matter of being. Because art isn’t a thing, it is a life.
A painter might begin with a palette full of color, a designer might begin with a mood or feeling, but it is a lifetime of experiences – and the courage to express them -- that turn those materials into art. The artist puts everything they are into their work and then they go in search of inspiration to enhance who they are and what they have learned. They look to nature, they look to other artists and artisans, they look at the hallowed and the profane. They walk through whatever door is opened to them that might end in discovery because that is where the magic happens.
Painter Lee Krasner experienced that when she opened herself up to nature. Sitting at her home at The Springs in East Hampton, surrounded by fields of brush and birdsong, with Accabonac Creek meandering at the edge of her farmhouse property, she listened to nature’s contrapuntal symphony until she dissolved into it – the sounds, but also the smells, the feel of the air on her skin, the landscape, the light.
The realization completed her. It pervaded her spirit. It was a revelation she had been waiting for. Back in her studio, it was her arms and hands that moved across the great expanse of linen but it was nature directing the lush and fertile images. Vines, flowers, wombs. Joy.
Nature has long been a fundamental part of Ulla Johnson’s creations. Her designs are celebrations of pure colors, patterns, and textures. It is no surprise then, that Krasner’s work spoke to her. It is also no surprise that, as an artist having experienced it, Johnson made Lee’s work part of her own. Inspiration, collaboration, transformation is the very essence of creation.
Ulla has reinterpreted Lees paintings, among them fully abstract Comet, Portrait in Green, and gestural masterpiece about regeneration Palingenesis, and given them new life on the body. As a result, a Lee Krasner is no longer something we look at, it’s something we live in.
It is alive with the spirit of the two women who created it, women who never knew each other but who are part of a great and glorious continuum of art and life. It is there to be admired, immersed in, worn. It is there to inspire the next artist, who will make their own re-creation. It is there to inspire those who see it to live their own life as a work of art.
Words by Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women, for Ulla Johnson in celebration of the Spring/Summer 2025 Runway.
© 2024 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / ARS