Ann Veronica Janssens

Ann Veronica Janssens was born in 1956 in Folkestone, United Kingdom. After studying art history in England, Ann Veronica Janssens studied at the École nationale supérieure des arts visuels de La Cambre, Brussels, Belgium. Janssens has had numerous solo exhibitions, including in 1997 at MuHKA, Antwerp; 2001 at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin and Kunstverein Munich, Germany; 2003 at Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland and CCA, San Francisco, USA; 2007 at Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany; and 2009 at Wiels in Brussels, Belgium. She participated in the 5th Istanbul Biennial, Turkey in 1997, Manifesta 8 in Murcia, Spain in 2010, and the Sydney Biennial in Australia in 1998 and 2012. Together with Michel Francois, she represented the Belgian Pavilion at the 48th Venice Biennale, Italy, in 1999. In 2012-2015, she was studio director at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris, France. The artist lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.

For Ann Veronica Janssens, the most important artistic material is an immaterial substance: light. She uses different light sources and light-triggering substances and employs mists or transparent liquids and colors that create reflections and optical illusions. Her works balance on the spatial and perceptual boundaries of the interaction between opacity and transparency, exploring the differences between reality and fiction. She establishes a kind of laboratory situation: visitors are exposed to physical phenomena, works as experiments, and at the same time are referred back to the process of their perception, as their own interaction in space. The artist's goal is an increased sensual experience of reality(ies). (Doris Leutgeb)

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