About

Movement has been at the root of Lydia Janssen’s practice for over twenty years. A former professional modern dancer whose career ended through injury, Janssen came to painting with a dancer’s instinct, to capture a sense of impermanence. As a novice painter, she found that attempting to paint movement directly was futile. Instead, she turned to animals, the gallop of a horse, the hop of a rabbit, as a way of conveying motion at its most universal. From there the work moved closer to human limbs, and then to the body’s own record of the injury, and its impact.

Over the years the subject has continued to evolve. As an American-born expat who has lived between Asia and Europe for over fifteen years, the movement Janssen once associated with dance has become that of a nomad, in all its restlessness, and with it, questions of displacement, identity, community and home. She works in oil paint, charcoal and pastel, mainly on linen and paper, thinning her oils to create the quality of a stain, a sense of impermanence, of motion half-caught.

Two of her recent solo exhibitions, All the King’s Horses (2018) and Yellow Brick Road (2023), followed Humpty Dumpty as he falls and rises again, resilient, and Dorothy as she navigates an unfamiliar path, meeting characters who alter the course of her life. In her latest series, The Birds, animals are drawn within abstracted rectangles, encaged within a kind of house, wanting to be free, yet somehow content within their confines.

Janssen (b. 1976, USA) is represented by REDSEA Gallery in Singapore. She lives between Bali and Portugal with her husband Luke and their three children.