Jana Coolen

(born 1996 in Antwerp, BE)

In general, I am a painter, because most of my work is based inside the painting medium, I graduated the Royal Academy of Antwerp with a painting Ma, and it is my most comfortable and most knowledgeable language. But at the core of my practice I work with and collect ideas, mostly in relation with their language and/or to their context, and try to find ways to understand, transform and reflect on these.

The themes and obsessions in and around my work are history, religion and mythology; systems and methodology; the relation between archetypical imagery and personal experiences; and how all these frameworks interact, shape and reframe each other.

In the way I try to understand and evaluate my practice, the actual work is the interaction between the viewer and the object, and so hopefully a new version of the work is created by every viewer, who reads and reacts based on their own internal narrative and experience. And ideally, once in a blue moon, this version challenges the pre-existing narratives.

(simplified: I watch a lot of videos about history of religion, different historic contexts, ancient more esoteric stuff, anything AI related and too much world news… And love diagrams.)