Janet Werner

Janet Werner is a painter whose work has focused for many years on the fictional portrait. Her recent paintings are based on figures drawn from popular culture, including  models, dolls, celebrities and figurines. In her current portrait series icons and archetypes of innocence and beauty are divorced from their original contexts and resituated in her paintings so that the "portraits" become vehicles for an exploration of subjectivity, desire, seduction and transformation.
 
Werner has shown widely in Canada at public and private galleries as well as artist-run centres. Selected solo shows include the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts, Montreal, Art Gallery of Windsor, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Ottawa Art Gallery, Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art and the Musée du Québec. Internationally, her work was presented at the Prague Bienale  She has received numerous awards including the Canada Council New York studio and Paris studio.

Education

BFA          MarylandInstitute College of Art, 1985
MFA          Yale University School of Art, 1987

Areas of expertise

Painting, drawing

Research interests

Historical and contemporary portraiture, fashion, kitsch, popular culture, beauty and the grotesque,  subjectivity, representation