Biography

Johanna Weis trained and worked – in Switzerland, France, and Nicaragua – first in medical research, then – in France, the United States, the Netherlands, and Switzerland – as an object conservator specializing in gilded frames and polychrome wood. Since 2010, she has been active as an artist, and currently lives and works in Berlin. Her experimental approach to art-making involves the recourse to chance, the agency of materials, and bilateral symmetry. Her work, especially her paper cuttings, has been presented in group and personal exhibitions in Switzerland and Germany. She has co-directed a workshop on the Rorschach test and autopoiesis at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Bourges and is currently preparing an artist’s book.

Project Summary

In her “klecksographies,” “radiographies” and in the series “Female composers’ signatures,” Johanna Weis found inspiration in the writings and illustrations of poets (Kerner), biologists (Haeckel), psychiatrists (Rorschach) and anthropologists (Schuster). Parallel to this dialogue with past scientists, mediated by their publications, she has taken advantage of residencies in many countries and several research centers to develop a conversation with present scholars, especially art historians, which she intends to pursue at I Tatti. Drawing from I Tatti’s natural, cultural, and intellectual environment, she plans to develop a project centered on a revisitation of Hermann Rorschach’s 1921 Psychodiagnostics, informed by Damion Searls’s recent biography of the author.