Johanna Claerhout (b. 1998) is a painter working in Paris and Brussels. Coming from a family of artists, art has always shaped her life. Autodidact and art historian, she draws on both instinct and study to find her own path—working intuitively, always drawn to color, light, and composition.

Claerhout paints flowers as portraits: subjects charged with memory, emotion and a deep, personal sense of beauty. Inspired by the floral still lifes of the Old Masters, she reinterprets a subject once too easily dismissed as merely decorative or light, restoring it as one of presence, complexity and strength. Her compositions are staged like theatre sets, where she puts her hand-picked flowers within a complex play of light. Shadows appear sharp, faded or doubled in unexpected hues, becoming as present as the flowers themselves. Each composition searches for a tension between light and dark, depth and flatness, reality and imagination.

With her portraits Claerhout does exactly the same thing, capturing someone’s gaze and essence in bold colors, putting the subject literally in the spotlight.

At the root of it all is recomposing nature, and a wish to share the beauty and joy she finds in it.