Joana de Oliveira Guerreiro, Gone to the Dogs

Gone to the Dogs

Painting, Industrial Paint on Canvas, 39.5 x 49.5cm, £350

About:

Based in Liverpool, Portuguese artist Joana de Oliveira Guerreiro delves into matters of art history, gendered authority and political power with a great dose of allegorical irony. Animation and painting are her principal mediums of choice, occasionally accompanied by photographs and poems. Following personal concerns for the environmental crisis of recent times, Joana privileges working with waste material, found around the docks where her studio is located. Instead of succumbing to the many restrictions arising from such sustainable decisions, like dealing with dried or mismatched paint, Joana’s creative process is able to bend what is on hand to inform and serve her desired outcome. All is worth commenting on giving the artist endless ideas and pathways to explore but there is a special ingredient that is the common denominator in all the work – humor and the possibility that something funny can transcend the most serious topics. This is driven by a conscious desire for turning social commentary into metaphoric representations and giving each body of work a bigger meaning.

“Gone to the dogs is a painting that results from an art residency spent in Valladolid, Spain in 2020. At the time, the European union funded that residency and Brexit was about to happen. I created a body of work entitled nobody hates Brexit as much as Brexit hates itself. All the work was an irony that wanted to show how Brexit was a self-inflicted pain and a collective shot in the foot by the British. Each piece of work was satirical and ironic. Gone to the dogs shows 3 greyhounds racing, a very British thing to do but the expression gone to the dogs means that something has failed. The materials are canvas and industrial paint and acrylic. Materials donated by the EU.”

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