It cut through blood

Galerie Gilla Loercher | Contemporary Art is excited to enrich the Gallery Weekend Berlin 2022 with “It cut through blood”, a solo exhibition of works by British painter Joanna Jones.
Joanna Jones has developed a very idiosyncratic visual language over the last four decades, which is probably most closely related to the Abstract Expressionism of Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler or Grace Hartigan. And yet Jones’ approach is quite different, also more radical and immediate. Her imagery is very energetic and expressive, and she allows the viewer to participate in her incredible sense of colour and tone. The painter uses her body exclusively for the application of paint, whereby it is not about frottage here but rather about dancing, flowing movement in the paint and a direct expression of an inner world, her thoughts and feelings. Joanna Jones places the generally large-format canvases on the floor of her studio and proceeds in a kind of ‘blind’ flight into the colour, she then repeats the process again and again, gets up and looks at what has been created almost blindly, and then decides with which colour, with which consistency of colour or with which movement she continues her composition.
The depth effect that her paintings achieve, painted with egg tempera in many layers of the most varied colour textures, is impressive. Her paintings seem to have no beginning and no end. You cannot read the creative process from them either. Images are created that stimulate contemplation and calm and evoke a very sensual colour perception.

"I paint using a performative process that positions my body as an agency of a particular kind of knowing, taking painting into the territory of an event – a constitution of elements that make something happen: the consistency of the paint, my choice of colour, what concerns my mind, what vibrates through my body, what rings in my ears. Alexander Kluge said that the only thing that we own is ourselves – it’s true but there is nothing to which we are not connected.“ (Joanna Jones, March 2019).

The exhibition title “It cut through blood” refers to the energy of emotion as it dances with the hum of existence, explains Joanna Jones.

All paintings shown are from 2020/21/22.


The British artist Joanna Jones (born 1945) lives and works in Dover (UK). Following a foundation year at Northwich College of Art, she continued her studies in London at the Byam Shaw. Jones received her National Diploma of Design in painting from Goldsmiths, and graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 1970. Joanna Jones is a recipient of several awards including the first prize in the Greater London Councils painting competition (1969), a scholarship from Künstlerhaus Balmoral in 2000 and an Arts Council England Year of the Artist award for a work at Samphire Hoe in 2001.
Her works have been shown in many international exhibitions s.a.: Arts Council England (UK); Royal Academy, London (UK); Wrexham Arts Centre, North Wales (UK); The City Gallery of Leicester, (UK); Leicester City Museum, (UK); National Gallery of Canada, Montreal (CDN); Taipeh Gallery, New York (US); Künstlerhaus Balmoral, Bad Ems (D); London Biennale (UK); The Turner Contemporary, Margate (UK); Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (D); Stadtmuseum Bad Ems (D); Museum Mühlheim (D); Offenes Kulturhaus, Linz (A); Pharos Centre for Contemporary Art, Nicosia (CY); Pharos Trust, Melina Mercouri Cultural Centre, Nicosia (CY); Karmeliterkloster, Frankfurt (D); Städtische Galerie, Bad Soden (D); Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin (D).