Joanna Gleich

Joanna Gleich (born 28 September 1959 in Kluczbork (Poland) lives and works since 1989 as painter in Vienna, Austria. A student of Wolfgang Hollegha and Josef Mikl at the Vienna Akademie der bildenden Künste, she has exhibited in the United States, Austria, Germany and Poland. She is married to the Austrian artist and former art professor Gerhard Gleich.

Joanna Gleich: Abstraction as a Form of Seduction."
Mark Rothko while speaking about abstraction emphasized that the artist either simplifies or exaggerates it. This exaggeration that can be paralleled to "an explosion of energy" is in Joanna Gleich's works captured by the complex power of the brush strokes that have to be inscribed over and over again. Upon this act of re-inscription, while making an abstract painting, insisted as well Andrew Benjamin in his book What is Abstraction? (1995). In order to establish an interpretation of Gleich's impressive and suggestive number of paintings, it is necessary to answer as well to the question Why Abstraction? - in the time that seems captured by figurative and mimetic images. I can try to answer in an elliptical way, making reference to A. Benjamin: "rather in having to uncover plurality, it is the desire for complexity that needs to be acted out" here. This complexity is possible to be seen in Joanna Gleich's works as intensity of colors and materiality that is intrinsically connected with the corporeality of Gleich's gesture. Or, being even more explicit: "What comes to be held in place is allowing for a certain threat; holding to a form of seduction; a holding yielding an engagement, even another passion." A. Benjamin...Marina Grzinic, Catalogue, October 2004

External links

*http://www.gleich.at/