Inscribed in the Air
January 29 — March 12, 2022
Brussels
Joan Jonas’s drawing practice has been a core through line in her work, connecting her multidimensional and disciplinary practice that spans performance, sculpture, film, and dance over the last fifty years. For her first exhibition with the Gallery, Jonas presents a selection of significant drawings that reference animals, history and her own body.
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.
Installation
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About
Photo by Toby Coulson
Joan Jonas (b. 1936, New York) is a world-renowned artist whose work encompasses a wide range of media including video, performance, installation, sound, text, and sculpture. Jonas' experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s continue to be crucial to the development of many contemporary art genres, from performance and video to conceptual art and theatre. Since 1968, her practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of rituals, and the authority of objects and gestures.
Jonas has exhibited and performed extensively around the world. Her notable exhibition history includes Documenta 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, and 13; the 28th São Paulo Biennial; the 5th Kochi-Muziris Biennale; and the 13th Shanghai Biennale. She has recently presented solo exhibitions at the United States Pavilion for the 56th Edition of the Venice Biennial; Tate Modern, London; Museu Serralves, Porto; Pinacoteca de São Paulo; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; Dia Beacon; Haus der Kunst, Munich; and The Drawing Center, New York. Most recently, the Museum of Modern Art in New York hosted a retrospective of Jonas's work. Jonas is the recipient of many awards including The Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon (2016); the Maya Deren Award given by the American Film Institute (1989); and the Lifetime Achievement Award given by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2009). In 2024, she was presented the Nam June Paik prize, awarded to artists who have contributed to the development of contemporary art, mutual understanding, and world peace; and in 2018, Jonas was awarded the prestigious Kyoto Prize, given to those individuals who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of mankind.
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