With “Dark Matter,” Martine Johanna offers a new collection of stirring acrylic paintings that blend portraiture and abstraction. The show, running through June 23 at KochxBos Gallery in Amsterdam, is an autobiographical exploration of femininity, adolescence, and the place of women in Western culture. Johanna was last featured on HiFructose.com here.
The women that populate Martine Johanna's world are pensive warriors who occupy a place of tension between powerful command and fragile insecurity; and between upstanding morality and dark cruelty. In many ways, the figural subjects of Johanna's paintings are conflate the complex binaries between which people battle and waver, settle and compromise. While each subject is shown as unique in appearance and mood, they are all united by a distant, thoughtful gaze − a metaphor for the wandering, worrying human mind.