Johanna Bath work is about time, it’s passing, the fleetingness of a moment and the impact memory has on us as humans. She is interested in finding a visual language for dealing with the loss of the present at any given moment, how memories are stored away in our consciousness, how we remember certain moments and why. Once she read that melancholy is ‚the feeling of loss of the present‘ and found that to be a beautiful paraphrase so she is exploring those feelings in her paintings.
We get to experience millions of moments in our lives - but each one only once. This simple fact never fails to inspire me. When one realizes that being human means saying goodbye to the present every second of your life, it hurts. We repress this inevitable transience every day in order to be able to function normally. If we were always aware of this, we would go crazy, she supposes. So she is making art to deal with the loss, to get hold of the present and to revisit and trigger favorite memories and share her thoughts and feelings by the visual language of painting.
Her aim is to create work that captivates the viewer with its quietness. Going into dialogue should be a calming, meditative experience and a paradox: In terms of content, the work deals with the passing of time, it’s movement, but in terms of contemplation, it should be almost like looking at a vacuum without time, a moment totally detached from it.
She describes herwork as poetic and feminine, also gentle, melancholic and dreamy but with a certain edge. She likes to create pieces that are the opposite of a loud and aggressive image but contain the same punch of intensity by being ultimately tender and delicate, getting under the skin by being vulnerable and containing an intimacy that is inviting to the viewer.