Notes and press citations
I like to put my feet on an imaginary line. It writes and draws itself. There is always the paper. There is always the canvas, the words and the colours. As soon as I write and paint, the paper is the place where something sometimes emerges that flashes into realisation for a moment. Sometimes the threshold appears where the inner and outer worlds merge. Sometimes the border between them becomes painfully visible. The figures of perception turn on their own axis and show different views. They seem to fall out of nowhere onto the paper like a breath into writing. Like a colour in a picture. Like a word in a poem.
Tablecloth notes
The tablecloth notes organically take up the visual language of the traces of colour used on tablecloths as a painting surface and that of the noted text and the painting/drawing and, on the one hand, playfully give space to chance. On the other hand, they go beyond mere illustration. This is what makes them so appealing. Each element is placed in a new context. The language space expands into the colour space and vice versa.
Seduction
The red of passionate (artistic) desire is expressed here, as is red as a symbol of the fire of life, love and change/transience. Red symbolises beguiling celebrations and relationships. Red hunts its prey. Interacts. Passions melt into it. Sunrises. Red wants no time to think. Together with blue, red is like an acquittal. Everything is possible.
In the butterfly garden
Violet is the colour of transcendence. What do you think of when you hear the word butterfly garden? Would you book a trip there if it were possible? Why? What would a place (in reality or in your imagination) look like that would fit the name? Have you ever been there?
Blue is a decoy
Ultramarine drives me up and away. Cobalt blue stands for night. Longing. Vastness. Reason and spirit. Through blue I can draw waiting loops. Views open up above it. Colourless things take cover. Blue brings things to the point. Even the distance is blue.
Drawings
Emerge as spontaneous sketches. Impulsive and quick. Sometimes on already printed paper or as a supplement to found materials. Often with black ink. Then forgetting becomes as white as memory. Black, on the other hand, weighs heavier than darkness.
Press citations
Where does she belong, this extraordinary woman? Literature? Visual arts? Yes. And yes. Düsseldorf artist Johanna Hansen moves light-footedly between the two. She creates painterly poetry and lyrical painting. Both arise from the same, somnambulistic inspiration. Sometimes Johanna Hansen transforms her words into drawings. Or she creates a book of poetry that is an enchantingly beautiful object full of images and also pays homage to the love of Clara and Robert Schumann: "Mondhase an Mondfisch".
Birgit Kölgen in Düsseldorf Aktuell. 19 AUGUST 2022
https://www.ddorf-aktuell.de/2022/08/19/hase-im-mond-malerische-lyrik-der-duesseldorfer-kuenstlerin-johanna-hansen/
What makes a person an artist? Talent, certainly. The desire to create their own work. But there is also a profound decision, a detachment from the tempting wastes of time of the present, a concentration on free, purposeful thought and, above all: unwaveringness. You can sense all of this in Düsseldorf painter and poet Johanna Hansen....
Birgit Kölgen in Düsseldorf Aktuell. 7.3.2018
https://www.ddorf-aktuell.de/2018/03/07/duesseldorf-paris-johanna-hansen-wo-die-dichterin-malt-93774/
"In our part of the world, white symbolises purity and innocence. And white is symbolically associated with the emptiness that we encounter in many different facets in the snow miniatures. There is, for example, the supposed emptiness, the innocence of a newborn child that brings the genetic make-up from its parents, but is only moulded, as it were, through education, experience and insight or rebellion and continues to write itself. Or there is the blank page, the white canvas, which is initially just material and still completely silent. Only through the art of a writer or a painter, who inscribe themselves into the unwritten, do they begin to speak.
zugluft der stille traces this inscription and thus the career of an artist. It is not a fictional biography, but the poetic condensation of her own life, as far as the uninitiated can verify this on the basis of researchable material. Hansen's approach is personal, yet never private. She tells of courage and self-empowerment, imagines the time of her birth, tells of her childhood, of imprints and influences and points to the present day. It is easy to see that the poems were written by a painter with a focus on visual perception and the targeted use of colours, the primary colour white, splashes of colour and colour codes. Which is hardly surprising, because Hansen, like so many others, is a double talent."
Monika Vasik for the signatures on zugluft der stille