Johanna Dreyer (b. 1989, Erlangen, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. Her recent exhibitions include: Beyond the Plate, Villa Drusiana, Residence of the German Ambassador to the United Nations Organisations, Rome (2025); SCOUT, Galleri Heike Arndt DK, Kettinge, Denmark (2025 and 2026); and The Space In Between, Backhaus Projects, Berlin (2025). Johanna holds a Master of Arts in Social and Economic Communication from the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK).
Dreyer’s practice stems from a method that is both rigorous and multilayered: an ever-growing archive of photographs, images and visual notes, which she continually develops as an attentive observer of the world around her. From there, the artist moves to a carefully orchestrated staging process, photographing purpose-built compositions before assembling the material into figurative collages. These define the work’s visual territory prior to its final translation into oil on canvas. Her background in graphic design is reflected in a compositional clarity combined with a keen awareness of the spirit of the age, creating a space for deep concentration that deliberately resists the accelerating pace of contemporary life.
In the series Beyond the Plate, the artist removes fruit and vegetables from their functional and culinary contexts, transforming them into the central protagonists of hypnotic, meticulously constructed visual worlds. A butternut squash, an aubergine: isolated and enlarged organic forms, suspended against vivid red backgrounds and fragments of mottled orchids, juxtaposed with pearls and blocks of butter whose surfaces appear almost marble-like. Nothing evokes nourishment any longer: food becomes surface, something to be looked at before it is consumed.
The paintings reflect upon a culture in which visual experience increasingly precedes material experience, and in which food is transformed into an object of desire, an aesthetic symbol and a means of self-representation. Removed from their original contexts and magnified through deliberately disorientating juxtapositions, vegetables, fruit and other natural elements acquire an almost sculptural presence, oscillating between allure and artifice.
Through this transfiguration, Dreyer brings to light the mechanisms that shape desire and define the relationship between the body, aesthetics and consumption. The series forms part of the artist’s broader interest in the processes through which contemporary society constructs value, identity and expectations by means of images. Rather than offering an explicit critique, Beyond the Plate opens up a space for observation in which the familiar suddenly reveals itself to be ambiguous, seductive and profoundly constructed.
Text by Valeria Conti