Johanna Helmuth (b. 1992, Philippines) is known for her highly-textured figurative paintings, based on personal experiences and narratives, which confront human behaviour, relationships and societal pressures. Vigorously worked using a palette knife, the paint’s scratched, scraped and damaged appearance becomes a shorthand for the corrosiveness and violence of the human condition in Helmuth’s darkly humorous and gestural works.
Helmuth received the 2018 Fernando Zobel Prize for the Visual Arts, Ateneo Art Awards, one of the top awards in the Philippines for young artists. She is also a three-time semi-finalist of the Metrobank Art and Design Excellence Award (MADE). She has exhibited extensively in group shows in Manila, Philippines; Taipei, Taiwan; Milan, Italy; and New York, United States, and has presented seven solo exhibitions to date.