Solo Exhibition – Changing Seasons
September 7th – October 12 2023
Red Sheep Gallery New York
The series of paintings in this exhibition were created over the past 12 month period. The artist made a conscious decision to change mediums, moving from acrylics to oils in an attempt to go deeper into her art practice. The body of work in the series is technically non-representational, but to say this would be a disservice to the countless natural inspirations in the artist’s daily life. Each painting was created in a gestural, expressionistic style, yet references the highly influential Canadian landscape around her.
The work in the exhibition is imbued with intense raw emotion and quiet tranquility and were created with thick multilayered, heavily textured oils that took the artist a year to complete. Rarely using brushes, the artist prefers the physical act of moving, scraping and removing paint with palette knives. The paintings went through many lives or “seasons”, changing drastically during the process, depending where her inspiration took her.
”My hope is that my abstracted landscape paintings in Seasons of Change hint at something familiar, yet remain open ended to allow the viewer’s imagination to complete the story ” -Johanne Brouillette
Contemporary Abstraction: Collaging Space and Color
May 25th – September 6th 2022
Moberg Gallery 2911 Grand Avenue, Des Moines, IA 50312
“Johanne Brouilette’s two large-scale acrylic paintings feel like floating warriors, fluid tussling, the wrestle more elegant than violent. “Fighting for Freedom” and “Fighting for Freedom II” use black and burnt orange, with white as a translucence, to create shimmering spider-like figures made of slow choreographies.”
Text by Michaela Mullin
Summer Group Show
August 4 – October 8, 2021
Moberg Gallery 2911 Grand Avenue, Des Moines, IA 50312
“Two large-scale works Johanne Brouillette conjure Greek gods. “Phaunos” and “Gaia,” mixed media paintings, speak of the mother of nature and the house itself (earth) of which she is matriarch. The former is an incredible blur of paint strokes that operate almost as if one is looking down, through the clouds, to the forest; the aeriality affords us a long view, where the volume of paint makes it difficult to discern applications (trees).”
Text by Michaela Mullin
Contemporary Women Paint: Abstract Expressions
January 29 – March 20, 2021
Moberg Gallery 2911 Grand Avenue, Des Moines, IA 50312
“The movement in Johanne Brouillette’s four works— “Finding Courage,” “Finding Hope,” and “Finding Joy I & II”—feel like choreographed dance, slowed, so that in their movement, figuration appears. The thin striping lines like drips or strings move separately, but touch. In rhythm with itself, the main abstract interests work from a centralized (though compositionally off-center) core, where color and form meet, where the viewer’s eye is drawn to intertwining—an embrace in motion, the tightest one being that of red and black in her “Joy” paintings.”
Text by Michaela Mullin
July 2020 – Presented with the Antoinette Stevens BEST IN SHOW 1st Award of Excellence for JOIE DE VIVRE II by the Society of Canadian Artists.
December 6, – February 27, 2020 Group Winter Show Moberg Gallery, Des Moines, IA, USA
September 13, 2019 – October 18, 2019 Kicking Abstract & Taking Names, curated by Conn Ryder Moberg Gallery, Des Moines, IA, USA
“Between Us (V)” and “Between Us (VI),” by Johanne Brouillette, are large-scale acrylic and mixed-media on canvas, on which Brouillette pares down color, darkening the canvas with browns and blacks, but then pulling out the light with her whites. This contrasting of almost fan-like strokes and pieces ends in a layering and graying that becomes victorious through pugilist-like action, which feels swift and sudden. Brouillette’s choreographed marks are finessed from a realm of sensory improvisation, manifesting what appears as an abstract x-ray, though its mystery is in the effect being rendered with paint’s opacity.
Text by Michaela Mullin
Featured in the exhibition:
Johanne Brouillette, Margaret Fitzgerald, Sarah Grant, Dana James, Anita Jung, Trixie Pitts, Ellen Rolli, Conn Ryder, Karen Scharer, Julie Schumer, Daniela Schweinsberg, Alayne Spafford and Pamela Staker.Press release: Exhibition documentation
Volume 15, Spotlight Art: Circle Arts Foundation, France, July 2019
Artsy Shark Featured Artist Johanne Brouillette, April 2020
Parution dans le magazine REMAX Bonjour, Agence immobilière, Printemps 2019
JOHANNE BROUILLETTE 