MORE Gorssel
19 juni 2022 t/m 30 oktober 2022

Anya Janssen

A comprehensive survey of the art of Anya Janssen (1962) is now being shown for the first time. The Earthlings exhibition at Museum MORE features some forty highlights of her oeuvre from the early nineties to the present. Janssen regards humanity with a sense of wonder that manifests itself ambiguously in her monumental portraits. Her work operates between reality and imagination. ‘Painting for me is an ultimate attempt to get closer to people.’

Janssen’s own youth feeds into her work too. Growing up in the Mookerheide region, she loved to wander through the woods and explore nature. She still likes to collect unusual plants, dead animals and skulls and to preserve specimens in formaldehyde. Janssen’s studio has become a Wunderkammer, devoted to transience and melancholy. Her Parliament of Monsters series shows human beings trapped within the frame of the canvas, like small creatures in a glass jar. Vulnerability, compassion and fear combine in her work. ‘I sometimes say that I paint beauty with the charm of a razor.’

In Ecce Homo, Janssen briefly returns to the self-portrait, in which she confronts her own mortality, while drawing inspiration from the seventeenth-century painter Francisco de Zurbarán . But this is not just a self-portrait in the traditional sense, it also appears as a metaphor, a symbol of transience.

Are you visiting our museum and would you like to get in the mood? Then listen to the music that Anya Janssen plays in her studio on Spotify.