Joanna Jones | It cut through blood
Galerie Gilla Loercher | Contemporary Art is excited to enrich the Gallery Weekend Berlin 2022 with “It cut through blood”, a solo exhibition of works by British painter Joanna Jones. Joanna Jones (born 1945) has developed a very idiosyncratic visual language over the last four decades, which is probably most closely related to the Abstract Expressionism of Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler or Grace Hartigan. And yet Jones’ approach is quite different, also more radical and immediate. Her imagery is very energetic and expressive, and she allows the viewer to participate in her incredible sense of colour and tone. The painter uses her body exclusively for the application of paint, whereby it is not about frottage here but rather about dancing, flowing movement in the paint and a direct expression of an inner world, her thoughts and feelings. Joanna Jones places the generally large-format canvases on the floor of her studio and proceeds in a kind of ‘blind’ flight into the colour, she then repeats the process again and again, gets up and looks at what has been created almost blindly, and then decides with which colour, with which consistency of colour or with which movement she continues her composition. The depth effect that her paintings achieve, painted with egg tempera in many layers of the most varied colour textures, is impressive. Her paintings seem to have no beginning and no end. You cannot read the creative process from them either. Images are created that stimulate contemplation and calm and evoke a very sensual colour perception.
"I paint using a performative process that positions my body as an agency of a particular kind of knowing, taking painting into the territory of an event – a constitution of elements that make something happen: the consistency of the paint, my choice of colour, what concerns my mind, what vibrates through my body, what rings in my ears. Alexander Kluge said that the only thing that we own is ourselves – it’s true but there is nothing to which we are not connected.“ (Joanna Jones, March 2019).