Joanna van Son

Joanna van Son is a London-based painter whose work uses oil on canvas to examine the female figure through spatial, architectural, and material frameworks. Born in Oman to Venezuelan/Irish and Dutch parents and raised across China, Russia, and the UK, she works with themes of displacement and belonging through fragmented or distorted bodies. Her architectural training at The Bartlett shapes her approach of working on unprimed cotton canvases attached to the wall, then removing and stretching them to retain the marks of their construction. Van Son’s paintings emphasize the textures of skin and surface through impasto, exposed stitching, and visible seams, underscoring the tension between body, structure, and memory.