Janet Werner


Janet Werner is a Canadian artist based in Montreal. Her work is known for its incisive and playful depictions of female figures, raising questions about the nature of the subject in painting.

Biography

Janet Werner was born in 1959 in Winnipeg, Manitoba and currently resides in Montreal, Quebec, where she teaches at Concordia University. Werner studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, and, in 1985 she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts. Later, she studied at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where she received her Masters of Fine Arts in 1987. From 1987 to 1999 she taught painting and drawing at the University of Saskatchewan, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Work

Werner is known primarily for her large scale fictional portraits. She has been focusing on the genre since 1997. Werner explores themes of subjectivity and desire by producing composites of found images. Recent paintings have explored painting's relationship to ideas of realism and the photograph. It can be said that the artist uses painting to deconstruct the ubiquity of the photographic image.

Collections

Werner exhibited at the Art Gallery of Guelph in 2019.

Selected Exhibitions