Ann Veronica Janssens

Ann Veronica Janssens is an artist born in Folkestone, England, in 1956. Based in Brussels, she has developed an experimental practice that challenges conventional ideas of sculpture by working with ephemeral and intangible phenomena. Since the late 1970s, she has created a distinctive visual language centred on the "ungraspable," using light, colour, sound, artificial fog and translucent or reflective materials to destabilise the boundaries of physical space and immerse viewers in states of sensory uncertainty. She studied at La Cambre National School of Visual Arts in Brussels. Janssens emerged internationally through a radical approach to "spatial sculpture," moving away from solid, autonomous objects to create environments using materials and phenomena such as artificial fog, glass, mirrors, colour and reflected light. In 1999, she represented Belgium alongside Michel François at the 48th Venice Biennale, where their intervention filled the Belgian Pavilion with dense mist that disoriented visitors. Further milestones include her 2020 solo exhibition Hot Pink Turquoise at the South London Gallery and the major survey Grand Bal, presented at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan in 2023. Her practice encompasses both large-scale installations and intimate sculptural objects, frequently drawing on the physics of light and the mechanisms of vision to explore perception as a fluid and subjective experience. Throughout her career, Janssens has developed an approach characterised by a deliberate "losing control" of the gaze. Her immersive fog installations, in which coloured light and dense mist remove stable visual reference points, transform sight into a physical and spatial experience. Rather than presenting a void of pure colour, these environments make viewers acutely aware of their bodies, movements and perceptual limitations. By employing industrial materials such as paraffin oil, dichroic glass, aluminium and mirrors, Janssens investigates the "materiality of the immaterial," bringing the precision of optical phenomena into tension with the instability of human perception. Janssens has exhibited extensively at major international institutions. Her solo exhibitions include presentations at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, WIELS in Brussels, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, the South London Gallery, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and the Wellcome Collection in London. Her work has also appeared in major international biennials and is held in prominent public collections, including that of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Janssens’s work brings artistic experimentation into dialogue with physics and sensory perception. By treating light, colour and atmosphere as active materials, she creates situations that call into question the reliability of vision and reveal how unstable, embodied and contingent our experience of space can be.