Janet Werner

Since the 1990s, Janet Werner has been developing her own, distinct brand of fictional portraiture, using found, fashion photographs (mostly of women), which she routinely cuts up in the manner of cadavre exquis, before recombining parts and transforming the figures in paint via further stylistic operations.

The resulting, composite characters have been said to address issues of gender and representation, ideological conditioning and psychological vulnerability (beauty, or prettiness, being often pitted against destruction), while simultaneously appealing to humour, fantasy and seduction.

The current exhibition is a compact survey of the last decade of the artist’s work, during which such references to humour and the carnivalesque have tended to recede somewhat, in favour of a more measured approach. Since 2015, Werner has also been giving increased attention to the paintings’ production context, representing the studio as work site, with source photographs and paintings cohabiting in a mise en abyme that even occasionally disposes of the figure altogether.