Dreams of the Seen and Unseen
Marie Louise Elshout, James Johnston and special in our kabinet guest Peter Doherty
November 7th 2025 – January 3rd 2026
opening reception: November 7th, 6-9pm
With the exhibition “Dreams of the Seen and Unseen,” the janinebeangallery presents a juxtaposition of the artistic positions of Marie Louise Elshout and James Johnston starting November 7, 2025.
Marie Louise Elshout (born 1967 in Delft) combines drawing and painting in her work to create fascinating visual worlds. Delicate pencil and charcoal textures, overlaid with transparent layers of oil, create hybrid figures that oscillate between human and animal.
Inspired by 19th-century daguerreotypes, she places her figures in historical settings where tradition, fairy tales, and superstition continue to thrive. Landscape and nature appear not as backdrops, but as protagonists and mirrors of the fragility of human existence.
Elshout’s works combine beauty and ambivalence, seducing with vibrant colors while simultaneously confronting questions of power, rituals, and our relationship with nature.
James Johnston (born 1966) is also known as a musician with Gallon Drunk, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds as well as PJ Harvey, and has established himself as a painter in recent years. His first paintings were created on tour in hotel rooms; today, he works daily in his studio.
His paintings are figurative, raw, and expressive: bold colors, loose structures, and scenes full of mythic intensity characterize his visual language. Animals, nature, and solitary figures appear as mirrors of the human condition.
Nick Cave describes his works as „paintings full of mythic power.“ Johnston’s paintings are not a counterpoint to music, but rather an expression of the same immediate energy and archaic power.
The interplay with the works of Marie Louise Elshout creates an intense dialogue: While Elshout reflects on collective rituals and the fragile relationship with nature with precise drawings, historical allusions, and mythically charged hybrid creatures, Johnston condenses existential moods into expressive figurative scenes in which the mythical meets the present.”Dreams of the Seen and Unseen” presents two artistic positions that interweave the visible and the hidden, dream and reality, history and the present, inviting visitors to enter these in-between worlds.
In the cabinet we will welcome Peter Doherty as a special guest.
The typewriter artworks of Peter Doherty are sequences and little windows giving insight into his mind and examination of the world. This is not only perceptible by reading the texts but also in the pieces of paper they are written on, giving evidence in many ways of the moment and place they were created in. The varying types of paper from different locations and cultures, its aged and fragmental condition, little added illustrations and imprints, notes with pen and pencil, – these features are all synchronized with the text. Circumstances have resulted in the texts as they have worked on the paper. As such these typewritten texts are much more than containers of textual content, they synaesthetically merge into the visual creations they are written on.