Joan Jonas (b. 1936, New York) has exhibited and performed her work at museums and large-scale group exhibitions internationally. She has recently presented solo exhibitions at Dia Art Foundation, Beacon, New York; Thyssen-Bornemisza Museo Nacional, Madrid; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; Serralves Museum, Porto; Tate Modern, London; and the United States Pavilion for the 56th Edition of the Venice Biennial. Jonas will be the subject of retrospectives at the Haus der Kunst in Munich later this year and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in spring 2024.
Gladstone Gallery has announced it will present the artist’s work in Brussells next January 2022. Inspired by the intersection between fantasy and reality, Jonas explores myths, fairy tales, and the natural world in the works on view. The exhibition features a major installation of the series, ‘I know why they left’ (2017), created while Jonas was an Artist in Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2017. The artist photographed and documented an assortment of real and mythological creatures found throughout the museum, conservation labs, and archives. Redrawing and tracing from these photographs, Jonas paid particular attention to both birds and fish – animals in movement, studying their various states of swimming, gliding, and flying.
In ‘Draw on the wind’ (2018), Jonas extends this physical movement into her materials, employing bamboo and collaged paper to create kites that float in the gallery space. Following a formative trip to Hanoi in 2018, the kites were handmade in Vietnam, which Jonas then hand-painted and collaged with vividly colored paper cutouts. This is the third body of work in Jonas’s practice to incorporate kites and marks the European debut of “Draw on the Wind,” having only ever been exhibited at Carnegie International in 2018.
The forms that Jonas creates in her drawings stem from the connections she holds to spaces, living beings, and even her own body. This exhibition features a series of body drawings made by the artist during live performances between 1999 and 2017, wherein the combination of drawing and performance is at the forefront. The drawings of pagodas were made in response to her piece Reading Dante. Displaying intimate and sometimes uncomfortable aspects of one’s sensibilities, Jonas shows an examination of the self.
For further information on the exhibition visit the Gladstone Gallery website
Image Installation view: Joan Jonas, Draw on the wind, 57th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2018. Ⓒ Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Photo: Bryan Conley.
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