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

Work featured in Re: print

RE:PRINT edited by Véronique Chance and Duncan Ganley, brings together the work of twenty contemporary artists working in the field of expanded printmaking, to explore the relationship between print media, interdisciplinary art and new technologies. A hybrid of art object, book, physical and electronic form, RE:PRINT addresses concerns of reproducibility, technical developments and inter-medial approaches in contemporary art. Through an interplay of image and text from a diverse range of practitioners, RE:PRINT critically rethinks the notion of ‘print’ as both artwork and published multiple and debates what is print in the twenty first century. RE:PRINT includes work by: Jo Stockham, Jo Love, Steve Lovett, Rob Smith, Asim, Véronique Chance, Susana Gómez Larrañaga, Kelcy Davenport, Nerma Cridge, Fay Hoolahan, Richard Kearns, Annis Fitzhugh, Jame

Zeichnen im Garten der unendlichen Zeit

The English illustrator and printmaker Johanna Love has been undertaking artistic “voyages of discovery” for several years to explore the material and immaterial potential of dust. The starting point for her exhibition of drawings and lithographs at Bentlage Monastery are tiny samples of relic dust from a glass vessel in the “Bentlager Reliquary Garden” (1499), which is located in the Bentlage Monastery Museum. The dust samples that Johanna Love took there with the help of museum scientists and a restorer were examined using electron microscopy in the world-famous Natural History Museum in London. The use of this imaging technique makes information about reality accessible that would otherwise not be visible to the human eye. In her works, the artist translates these images into her own language

Lithografietage International Exhibition

International exhibition of lithography, Johanna Love was UK prizewinner at this juried lithography exhibition

Lichtlose Luft: Staub und Verschwinden Zeichnen /Lightless Air: drawing dust and disappearance

This publication presents the beginning of a new project by British artist Johanna Love, who is currently working closely with scientists at The Natural History Museum, London and The Regional Planetary Image Facility (RPIF) at UCL, London. Through a combination of photography and drawing, the project seeks to examine problems of human perception in relation to modern technology. It questions the scientific image as one that remains detached and outside of our experience, sitting at the precipice of our perceptual understanding, and making visible matter that is beyond human vision. The publication brings together the first body of work made by Johanna Love working with scientists, an essay by Curator Magdalena Wisniowska, GiG Gallery, Munich, and writings by two scientists, Dr Alex Ball and Dr Peter Grindrod, who discuss their roles and experiences of imagery obtained from two very opposing distances – gathering images from space, and from the microscope. 48 page publicatio

Jo Love

GiG Munich introduces a solo exhibition of the work of Jo Love, a British artist living and working in London, senior lecturer at Camberwell College of Art, University of Arts London. Jo Love has recently completed her PhD at Chelsea College of Art and Design, and her show at GiG Munich marks the continuation of her research into the viewed surface, the materiality and the time of the printed photographic image. Her work combines drawing with printmaking and photography, and uses the specks of dust found on the surface of the photographic image as the starting point of her investigations. At GiG Munich Jo Love shows two bodies of work. The first consists of a series of landscape drawings made in collaboration with a senior scientist at the Natural History Museum in London. In this series Jo Love re-draws the electron microscope images of marble and graphite particles in order to reclaim the tactile materiality lost to modern technology. She also imbues the image with a different kind of temporality to that of the digital experience. In the second body of work, Jo Love draws over a digital print of a video still, covering the inkjet surface with a layer of graphite. Only small pockets of saturated colour are left exposed. Taken together, the two different layers create an optically unstable image, disturbing and disrupting the act of viewing. Both drawings operate at the limits of human perception and invoke ideas of the technological sublime. As Jo Love states, “My interest lies in constructing images which are resonant with my experience and perception of the world: more fractured, open and complex than the more coherent image can convey, and one that offers an arena within which we can contemplate themes of time, memory and mortality.

Under a Darkening Sky

In Visibly Evident: An Exhibition of Work by Artists Using Photography. Visibly Evident features the work by contemporary artists who use photography, but not exclusively. Their other practices range from the purely conceptual to painting, sculpture and installation. Making photographs has been a consistent part of these artists' work for several years and reflects many of the mainstream interests of contemporary photography – the real, the synthetic, the constructed and deconstructed. In addition, it reveals an intriguing insight into the artists' other practices. Visibly Evident was originally conceived and curated by David Ross in 2010. The exhibition has since evolved towards its fourth manifestation, organised by Graham Monaghan-Revell and taking place in Northern Ireland

To a death in sweating wakefulness

To a death in sweating wakefulness. is an exhibition by Dawn Cole, Johanna Love, and Monica Petzal. Each artist traces back through their own family archives, German and British, to explore the emotional and physical impact of the conflict during the First and Second World War. All three artists share a fascination with looking back to the impact of war and conflict present in their familial pasts. Each draws on family photographic archives and oral histories to make work that embodies the inescapable emotional and physical uncertainties of living within conflict. Dawn Cole responds to the experiences of her Great Aunt, a WW1 Voluntary Aid Detachment Nurse who volunteered in September 1915 and was posted to France where she served for the duration of the war. Cole uses both personal archives and further research both in the UK and France. Cole’s works have a strong narrative content and includes print and textiles. Johanna Love re-examines her grandmother’s experiences of living through the bombing of Hamburg and the areas around Schleswig-Holstein, Germany throughout World War Two. Love draws on both personal archives and the archives at the Imperial War Museum, London to create paradoxical landscape images using printmaking and photography. She is interested in resonant images more akin with the complexities of human experience and perception. Monica Petzal focuses on her parent’s experience as German Jewish refugees from the Nazis. This work references her father’s profession as a metallurgist, his role in the British war effort and his return to a devastated Germany in 1946 to trade the detritus of war as scrap metal to the USA. It also refers to the bombing of Dresden, her mother’s home city by the Allied air forces. The work is chiefly based on contemporary film and her father’s annotated photos and includes print, painting and found objects

Lichtlose Luft / Lightless Air

A solo exhibition which is the second phase of a project working with scientists at The Natural History Museum, London and The Regional Planetary Image Facility (RPIF) at UCL, London. This exhibition presents a selection of current work by British artist Johanna Love, who is working closely with scientists at The Natural History Museum, London and The Regional Planetary Image Facility (RPIF) at UCL, London. Through a combination of photography and drawing, the project seeks to examine problems of human perception in relation to modern technology. It questions the scientific image as one that remains detached and outside of our experience, sitting at the precipice of our perceptual understanding, and making visible matter that is beyond human vision. What drives this work is a fascination with how tiny specks of dust – what seems most insubstantial – has the material power to fascinate, to generate and to sustain thought. The scientific technical image is a starting point for the work, either obtained through the electron microscope or the digital scanner. However, it is always submitted to some kind of digital manipulation and then manual intervention through drawing. In drawing from or within the original photographic image, there is a critique of technology and a questioning of the scientific approach. Through the process of drawing and digital manipulation, there is an attempt to bring the image back into the physical, material world of the living and imagination, for as Merleau Ponty (1964) states, ‘science manipulates things and gives up living in them.’ The first stage and the body of work made was exhibited at GiG Gallery, Munich in 2015

Re: Print

RE:PRINT edited by Véronique Chance and Duncan Ganley, brings together the work of twenty contemporary artists working in the field of expanded printmaking, to explore the relationship between print media, interdisciplinary art and new technologies. A hybrid of art object, book, physical and electronic form, RE:PRINT addresses concerns of reproducibility, technical developments and inter-medial approaches in contemporary art. Through an interplay of image and text from a diverse range of practitioners, RE:PRINT critically rethinks the notion of ‘print’ as both artwork and published multiple and debates what is print in the twenty first century. RE:PRINT includes work by: Jo Stockham, Jo Love, Steve Lovett, Rob Smith, Asim, Véronique Chance, Susana Gómez Larrañaga, Kelcy Davenport, Nerma Cridge, Fay Hoolahan, Richard Kearns, Annis Fitzhugh, James Hutchinson, Monique Jansen, Duncan Ganley, Mark Shaw, Nick Devison, Mark Graver, Meg Rahaim and Emily Godden. Designed in collaboration with CHK Design studio, London. Series editor: Gordon Shrigley. Size: 130 x 200 mm Print: Colour and black and white Binding: Cold glue, flat lay binding Limited edition Artists' Book of 250 copie