Joke Hansen’s (b. 1979, Bilzen) work is akin to a compendium of questions about how and what to paint. As in an endless exercise, Hansen circles her work around the making of paintings, collages and sculptures, with painting as the unmistakable axis from which her visual work unfolds. By testing the limits of the medium in terms of form and support as well as paint skin, her works sometimes present themselves as caricatures or ‘inside jokes’. Around five years ago, this radical pushing of painting on canvas led to Hansen’s first ‘cut outs’ and ‘shaped canvases’. Her practice subsequently developed into a permanent and almost obsessional attempt to break out of the traditional canvas, a constant discussion with and manipulation of the classic canvas or panel in its closed form: rectangle, square, circle, oval. More than once, ‘a road to be travelled’ (as in a computer game) is also the subject of a painting: a tubular structure, u-shaped pipes, technical environments, an exhaust pipe discharging into a cloud that seems to have become an onomatopoeia for ‘exit’. Works such as Tennis for Two (2021), Shank (2021) and Lola (2021) are fine examples.
