About

Joanna van Son (b. 2000) lives and works in London, UK. Van Son’s painting practice is rooted in a distinctly physical process that foregrounds both the layering and erasure of different images, often depictions of the female figure both inside and out. 

Van Son was born in Oman to Venezuelan/Irish and Dutch parents, and grew up in China, Russia, and the UK. Van Son commenced her current artistic practice while studying architecture at the Bartlett. 

Utilizing a variety of pigments she paints on thin unprimed cotton canvases nailed to the plaster walls of her studio. Once complete, each canvas is peeled off the wall and stretched onto a wooden frame. This unique practice exposes all the strokes and steps she has made, while also leaving a positive imprint, a trace, on the wall, which becomes the site of an extraordinary palimpsest that fragments and thickens over time. 

Ultimately, her fascination is with the playfully-violent grey zones of reality-making that are made visible by the practices of art and architecture. Van Son draws upon her engagement with both disciplines to paint the ‘forces’ that lie beneath meaning and affect and give them their structure, revealing the often-occluded processes that constitute belonging as well as its point of disconnect.

Exploring the female figure inside and out – her earliest studies were critically ambivalent self-portraits – her paintings and drawings distort the familiar spatial qualities of the human body, paying particular attention to the material and symbolic textures and sensitivities of the skin. 

It is all a study of belonging and inhabitation unfolding as an open-ended thought process that perverts a context’s conditions through fragments of longing figures that straddle between imagined and observed depictions in her studio and from her recollection. Her motive to understanding belonging is driven by the friction between drawing and painting in the act of figmenting circumstance from a figure itself. 

The figure is always already there.

From a young age, van Son was attracted to the intensity of bodily representations in Baroque art, taking particular interest in paintings by the master Caravaggio and the dynamism he brought forth through candlelight. Recognising the dynamic quality of figurations in Caravaggio’s, Michelangelo's as well as the contemporary artist Cecily Brown’s paintings, van Son developed a vital appreciation for the inner anatomies of process in her work.