Lisa Jo
Trouble Every Day

Opening – 26 APR 2024, 6-9 pm

Lisa Jo’s compositions are on the brink of collapse. She’s after the suspended image—precarious pause—before things fall apart. In her fractured picture planes, a cacophony of angular and rounded forms find tenuous cohesion. These works keep the viewer on their toes: there’s no sure footing, no place to settle here. Her Berlin-debut and first exhibition with the gallery, Trouble Every Day brings together a group of new paintings in oil on linen emblematic of Jo’s idiosyncratic abstraction. Glimpses of a hand, a branch, or a window are caught fleetingly before tumbling off into the picture plane. These hooks function like broken codes or unfinished sentences, as Jo finds form for what’s left unsaid. She addresses painting’s perennial concern with its surface—playing with negative space, unstable backgrounds, and graphic cut-outs with thinly-applied paint—while subtly mediating a process of revealing and concealing. 

Jo takes figurative forms from the 1970s erotic and satirical comics L’Echo des Savanes as a starting point for these works. She is attentive in particular to the ways in which the female form is consistently sexualized, whether thrown off a cliff or sweeping a floor, as well as the explicitly racist tropes common during the time period. Jo’s process slyly enters conversations around painting and identity politics, as she disassembles images laden with misogyny and racism, but makes no explicit declaration about deflating, reclaiming etc such imagery. The unraveling at work is almost indiscernible; her attention is to the unsaid. 

Lisa Jo (Los Angeles, 1983) lives and works in Berlin. Her work has been shown at galleries and institutions in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Cologne, most recently at the Kunsthalle Zurich.