Residency at Mack Art Foundation
2024 April - Juli
Greenpoint art studio
"The forward moving city, the ambitions, self expression and an incomparable current of a multitude of characters and cultures that move and unify the people of this city. To be part of that and be able to have that energy influence my work is something close to magic."Drawing direct inspiration from classic 1970’s color schemes, technicolor television and Fauvism. Dark surfaces on linen or panel, layered in daily narratives with rich colors and quintessential optimistic color spectrum, the paintings in this period are elaborately detailed, suggestive, mysterious, slightly humoristic and hypnotizing.
Solo exhibition
Hashimoto Contemporary
Los Angeles, USA
Solo exhibition
New York
This solo exhibition represents an investigation into image versus self-image and the ever changing, multifaceted role of women within a patriarchal culture. Her semi-autobiographical imagined female characters are placed within surreal surroundings, free to be erratic, elusive, and independent. Engulfed in dark, saturated, and fiery colors, each character embodies a heroic saga, powerfully and fiercely occupying the role of a protagonist that is holding on tightly to the fearless illusions of a dreamer. With visual references to Joan of Arc, Johanna paints heroines who are unapologetic, courageous, and rife with self-affirming power, not to be oppressed by traditional perspectives of male superiority. Through the bravery projected by each fantastical scene, Johanna’s paintings create visionary worlds that are safe from ridicule and judgment, celebrating women who exist within their own power.
How to Eliminate Stress and Anxiety through Good HousekeepingApril - May 2023
Playful yet weighty scenes focus the viewers’ attention on the stark duality of reality and dreamlike escapism, igniting discussions on a complicated identity crisis of what we are in comparison to what is expected, projected, or demanded from us. Her semi-autobiographical works feature large and vivid figures that hover between surrealist abstraction and complex, mysterious narratives. Johanna’s paintings explore perceptions of gender, beauty, personality and attraction, not only in relation to her own personal life, but also in relation to art history.
A Particular Ghost
January 2024Solo exhibition
Hashimoto Contemporary
Los Angeles, USA
FUTURE FAIR
May 2024Solo exhibition
New York
This solo exhibition represents an investigation into image versus self-image and the ever changing, multifaceted role of women within a patriarchal culture. Her semi-autobiographical imagined female characters are placed within surreal surroundings, free to be erratic, elusive, and independent. Engulfed in dark, saturated, and fiery colors, each character embodies a heroic saga, powerfully and fiercely occupying the role of a protagonist that is holding on tightly to the fearless illusions of a dreamer. With visual references to Joan of Arc, Johanna paints heroines who are unapologetic, courageous, and rife with self-affirming power, not to be oppressed by traditional perspectives of male superiority. Through the bravery projected by each fantastical scene, Johanna’s paintings create visionary worlds that are safe from ridicule and judgment, celebrating women who exist within their own power.
How to Eliminate Stress and Anxiety through Good HousekeepingApril - May 2023
Solo exhibition
Massey Klein Gallery New York
Playful yet weighty scenes focus the viewers’ attention on the stark duality of reality and dreamlike escapism, igniting discussions on a complicated identity crisis of what we are in comparison to what is expected, projected, or demanded from us. Her semi-autobiographical works feature large and vivid figures that hover between surrealist abstraction and complex, mysterious narratives. Johanna’s paintings explore perceptions of gender, beauty, personality and attraction, not only in relation to her own personal life, but also in relation to art history.
2024
2023
2023
A Particular Ghost
13-01-2024Solo exhibition
Hashimoto Contemporary
Los Angeles, USA
Martine Johanna’s ghosts are overwhelmingly female hauntings, emphasized and lamented in the artist’s solo exhibition A Particular Ghost at Hashimoto Contemporary, Los Angeles. The figures in Johanna’s paintings and drawings embody restless, ghostly fragments, illustrating how women's pleasure is entwined with the symbolic death of societal acceptance. Using rich greens and pinks or electric blues and yellows, the Dutch artist depicts these women confronting the viewer in ecstasy or turning inward to grieve the lack of mental freedom in the moments after. Throughout this entrancing series of works, the artist weaves a compelling narrative linking social ostracization to orgasmic pleasure and safety, expanding the idiom “small death.”
Each new painting peeks into Johanna’s private world, where she grapples with women’s hypervisibility and invisibility. Though it’s difficult not to stare at the women in explicitly sexual positions, the figures don’t return the same fascinated gaze, looking through the viewer as though our presence is inconsequential.
The artist also captures quiet moments with visible tension through imagined scenes like disembodied ghosts. Depicted as floating architecture enveloped by ethereal fog or precious gems hovering inside an aurora, the synthesis of women’s bodies and haunted landscapes evoke the many ways women are made invisible: silence, omission, force.
Bearing titles like A Round Object Has No Sharp Edge and A Ritual for a Small Death, the works in this exhibition aptly display society's double bind of harm and intimacy, of sexuality and humiliation. The emotional aspects of these works stems from Johanna's own emotional transformation as she confronts her discomfort around the women she paints, instilled by her religious upbringing. In publicizing these feelings, the artist entrusts her discomfort to someone else, releasing her female specters from the safety of her mind into the danger of reality. As such, each artwork holds a prayer for these ghosts to ensure a safe passage to another realm. In a perfect world, the ghosts that haunt Johanna could simply disappear.
A Particular Ghost opened on January 13th in Los Angeles and remained on view through February 3rd
Hashimoto Contemporary L