A brunette Sleeping Beauty, head bowed and smiling like a nice girl, is paired with a line from Emily Ratajkowski’s book My Body, and it holds two truths. Being alive in a body is a joy. The irony is the body it is attached to, the perfect princess body every little girl is taught to want but can’t have, which can be extended to the idealized bodies we consume on our social feeds as grown-ups.
A dinner table for two, lit in a near-perfect ellipse like a small planet in the dark. The objects are arranged like chess pieces in a game of dating. The details of the evening are withheld, while the all-consuming feeling of infatuation fills the whole frame.
Two daisies drift in slow motion inside a painted frame, one petal already loosened: the whimsical game of asking a flower whether you are loved, petal by petal. The underpainting glows through the dark ground, so the flowers seem lit from behind and still falling, never settling on one answer or the other.
A girl in a gold nameplate necklace that reads “omg” looks skyward, the way Renaissance and Old Master figures gaze up to God. In reference to Madonna’s 1989 song “Like a Prayer,” it is left open on purpose whether she is looking to heaven, to a man, or just rolling her eyes. The frame is paint, too.
A pearl necklace, almost a snake, almost a road (via), curls across a paper coaster from the New York restaurant. A token from a memorable night, real or imagined. Look closely and the pearls have no clasp: it only appears to be a necklace, tipping from reality into a dreamlike state.
A half-erased Post-it reads “fuck it”: a reminder not to take life too seriously. The stroke of the pen is barely visible on purpose, like an old note that still sits there as a constant reminder. A pretty bow softens the crude message and makes it whimsical. The tension of softness covering a guarded, jaded inner life becomes the central point of the artwork.
A nude seen from behind, caught mid-dance, one hand raised, hair swept by the movement. She plays against the biblical Eve and her shame: this Eve neither shrinks nor covers herself. She appears free, yet she stays frozen in a frame, there to be looked at.
A face emerges from shadow, partly hidden by leaves and a towel fresh from the shower: young, naked, uncertain. Girl or woman? Vulnerable or sovereign? The gaze holds an inner knowing far beyond her years. She was never the one who should be afraid.
Two roses float with no stem or support above the ghostly outline of a vase, an undone ribbon pooling at its base. Pretty, displayed, already on the way to being discarded: the painting plays with disappearance and the male gaze, and with what we mean when we call something lovely.
Johanna is a Berlin-based oil painter who borrows the technique and quiet drama of the Old Dutch Masters to look at the world through a modern, feminine eye. Working in thin, translucent glazes built up over many sessions, she makes surfaces that look flawless at first glance and then begin to unravel the longer you look. Perfection, in her hands, is always a little bit of a trap.
Her themes are femininity, projection, and impermanence: figures turn away and everyday objects become timeless keepsakes and memento mori. She takes a technique built historically to idealize and turns it toward a more skeptical, contemporary gaze, one less interested in perfection than in what perfection is used to hide, flatten, or sell.
Her process is slow by design, running against a culture of fast images and faster judgments. Since establishing her practice in 2022, Johanna has exhibited in group shows across Berlin. Alongside painting, she brings a background in photography, tech, and entrepreneurship to building her art practice.
My paintings stage the moments in which we are looked at, seen, or not seen at all. They are about love, memory, belief, and the nagging questions of whether we are seen, how we are seen, and who we present ourselves to be.
Each is built in thin, translucent oil glazes in the manner of the Old Masters, a technique made to idealize, turned here toward something more skeptical. The tone is ironic and self-deprecating. Tenderness is undercut by a joke, and a joke by sudden sincerity. Something is always withheld or in conflict, like a note half erased, a statement that lingers, or a gaze that goes somewhere we can’t follow. Nothing here sits fully still. Everything seems to be falling or flowing, like a memory, real or invented, being replayed forever.
