United Kingdom
Ann Veronica
Janssens
Biography
Born in 1956 in Folkestone, the United Kingdom, Ann Veronica Janssens today lives and works in Brussels. After earning a degree in art history in England, she pursued her studies in Belgium at the École nationale supérieure des arts visuels of La Cambre. Combining painting, sculpture and light – both natural and artificial – her work has been shown internationally since the early 1990s. In 1999, she represented Belgium with Michel François at the Venice Biennale. And she has exhibited at numerous institutions in Europe and the United States.
Recently, several solo shows have focused on her work, in 2017 at the Institut d’art contemporain of Villeurbanne (France) and in 2018, at the Baltimore Museum of Art (USA). Working in both the public domain and the world of museums and art institutions, she created a neon piece in 2012 for Geneva, stained-glass windows in 2013 for the Chapelle Saint-Vincent in Grignan (France), and is currently completing a commission for Université Paris Diderot.
About the artworks
Since the late 1970s, Ann Veronica Janssens has been developing an experimental body of work that favors on-site installations and the use of materials deliberately chosen for their simplicity and humble origins – chipboard, glass, concrete – or their immateriality – like light, sound, or artificial fog. Through these interventions, the artist questions the relationship between the body in space by confronting the viewer with environments or devices that spark a direct physical and sensorial experience of the architecture and the site. She looks, for example, to make the void part and parcel of her work by setting it “in motion, lending it a kind of temporality.”
Based on scientifically demonstrated phenomena, her seemingly minimalist works confuse the viewer’s perception mainly through light and lighting effects. Her experiments have led her to focus on the shimmer of surfaces with the ever-changing colors of certain materials that are chemically sensitive to light, or the unstable combinations of materials, or the hypnotic effects achieved when light bombards and dazzles the eye. With Janssens’ artworks, viewers face the “ungraspable,” a singular experience in which they lose a certain number of their usual points of reference. The time we spend looking at the work of art and the space in which it is displayed are two parameters that have to be taken into account in Janssens’ output, making each viewer’s encounter with the piece something unique.
The artworks
02
Magic Mirroir Pink #2, 2013-2016
Dichroic polystyrene film, security glass, float glass
Ed. of 1 + 1AP
120 x 120 x 1.8 cm
Magic Mirroir Pink #2, 2013-2016
Dichroic polystyrene film, security glass, float glass
Ed. of 1 + 1AP
120 x 120 x 1.8 cm
Blue Hawaii, 2018
Glass, paraffin oil, matte dichroic film, wooden base
120 x 60 x 60 cm
Blue Hawaii, 2018
Glass, paraffin oil, matte dichroic film, wooden base
120 x 60 x 60 cm