Under a darkening sky

Standpoint Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by artist Johanna Love. The exhibition centres on the artist’s use of imagery and materials to generate complex readings of space, surface and scale. Artist Johanna Love combines laser-etching, print, drawing and photographic languages to create unstable, shifting material surfaces and visually unfathomable images. In a new installation of work titled ‘Der Engel Schwieg’ (taken from Heinrich Böll’s 1940’s German novel describing some of the devastating personal experiences of WWII Germany) found images of landscape combine with scientific images of dust particles, gathered from the artist’s grandmother’s home in Hamburg, Germany, a city heavily bombed during World War II. The work was created in collaboration with The Natural History Museum, London. Through the work dust becomes a metaphor for memory, a physical archive of time and place. Love’s work moves between image and object; layers remain continually incomplete, revealing and hiding, almost falling apart then coming together again. Cut and drawn paper unfolds to suggest open pages of an unreadable book, inviting imagination whilst suggesting a dark history. The paper physically suffers through the etching process, yet it is also celebrating its own materiality. The exhibition also includes a time-based work ‘Der Himmel war Grau’ in which the artist explores her grandmother’s experiences of living through WWII Germany as a teenager. Oral history combines with manipulated photographic images to evoke an unnerving sense of uncertainty. While the work draws on the personal, a wider reference to history of place and the uncertainty of the future is evident. Love is an artist and academic living in London, UK. Her practice explores images that sit at the intersection between traditional problems of perception and modern technology, images that are at the edge of visual representation and provoke a number of paradoxical readings. Fractured, open and complex images offer an arena within which to contemplate themes of time, memory and mortality