Janet Werner - by François Letourneux & Ara Osterweil & Melissa E Feldman & Lisa Baldissera (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Sticky Pictures examines and celebrates the evolving work of Montreal-based artist Janet Werner. In her paintings, Werner builds a constellation of spatial and figurative explorations drawn from fashion magazines and art history to create collage-like composite figures that slip easily between articulations of beauty, gender, psychology and emotion. Werner's painterly operations are both unsettling and seductive, revealing the conditions of perception and looking as passageways to understanding the intensity of the world at hand. Werner's unique combination of abstraction, fictional portraiture, and the rich history of painting are explored in Sticky Pictures through texts by art and media historians, as well as an interview with the artist.

Janet Werner's work has been featured in international solo exhibitions from New York to Los Angeles and as far away as Cape Town. Her work was included in the Prague Biennale in 2003 and is featured in the collections of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Musée d'art contemporain in Montreal, The Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Canadian Embassy in Berlin, the University of Lethbridge, Owens Art Gallery in Sackville, the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon, Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco, and numerous private and corporate collections. Werner lives and works in Montreal.

Review Quotes

"Through painterly and conceptual ingenuity, Janet Werner has created a visual language to explore the multiplicity of the self. Her portraits revel in their provenance, explicitly referencing both fashion magazines and a range of precursors, including Francisco Goya, Édouard Manet, Alice Neel, Francis Picabia, and the sculptor Allen Jones. Werner, who attended the MFA program at Yale in the late 1980s with John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage, is a far more expressive painter than either, although she, too, strains the female figure through the sieve of popular culture, yielding a burlesque of idiosyncratic contortions and juxtapositions." -- Ara Osterweil, ARTFORUM