Artwork: baggage by Joana Lucas

About the Artist

Joana Lucas is a Portuguese visual artist living in Berlin. She creates photorealistic paintings that depict images of fractured daily life in urban environments. Her paintings show the fascination and power of the uncanny and strange through images that play with beauty, social media and classical aesthetics as a means to touch the viewer. She comprehends her surroundings through images and uses them as a code to interpret and communicate information. The scope of her methodology revolves around the relationship between photography and painting, as a way to frame an exact moment in life and trace the human passage. She graduated in Fine Arts from the Faculdade de Belas Artes de Lisboa, University of Lisbon, in 2003. In the same year she received a scholarship to attend the Statens kunstakademi in Oslo. In 2004, she studied advanced photography at the Portuguese Association of Photographic Art in Lisbon. In 2005 she received a scholarship for an internship at Kreuzberger Musikalische Aktion, Berlin. Since then she lives and works in Berlin. Her work has been shown regularly and in several international exhibitions since 2001.