Joan Jonas
°1936, New York (US) – lives and works in New York (US) and Nova Scotia (CAN)
Joan Jonas wrote art history in the 1960s as one of the first female artists to develop a new kind of art comprised of dance, installation, and video: the Happening. Out of this action-oriented art, most of which involved the audience arose her attention-getting performances. In a virtuoso manner, Jonas braids together video, sound, music, images, text, movement, and objects in space to create multifaceted, symbolic narratives about visual perception and the (one’s own) body in relation to environment and audience; about female identity, masquerade, and her role as a woman and an artist, as well as about legends and myths.
(Courtesy of Hatje Cantz)
Joan Jonas – What is Found in the Windowless House is True, exhibition view at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, 2017
Joan Jonas – What is Found in the Windowless House is True, exhibition view at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, 2017
Joan Jonas – What is Found in the Windowless House is True, exhibition view at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, 2017
Joan Jonas – They Come to Us without a Word (Bees), 2014-2015, installation view at US Pavilion, Biennale di Venezia (Photo by Moira Ricci)
Joan Jonas – Mirror Piece II, 1969-2018, performance at Tate Modern, 13 March 2018 (Photo by Stephen Chung)
Joan Jonas – Songdelay, 1973
Joan Jonas – Double Lunar Dogs, 1984
Joan Jonas has had numerous solo exhibitions at venues such as Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Bergen Kunsthall; MoMA, New York; Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Macba, Barcelona; Stedelijk, Amsterdam; IMMA, Dublin; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Tat Modern, London; Guggenheim, New York; and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Jonas participated in Documenta, Kassel six times; and was part of the Biennales of Sao Paulo, Yokohama, Sydney, Taipei, Lyon and Venice – often several times.
Joan Jonas is represented by the following galleries;
click through to discover more of her work.
