Janet Werner Is Distorting Fashion’s Beauty Ideals Through Painting
Pulling from Vogue archives and vintage campaigns, the artist twists the familiar fashion face into something much more exposing.
For nearly four decades, Janet Werner has built a practice rooted in transformation, one that pulls from the glossy world of fashion only to unravel it on canvas. Mining archival imagery from vintage Vogue issues and iconic campaigns like those by Marc Jacobs, Werner reconstructs familiar ideals of beauty into something far more complex. In her hands, the archetypal fashion model, often thin, blonde and emblematic of privilege, becomes distorted and, at times, unsettling, exposing a charged tension between glamor and the grotesque.
The artist’s latest body of work, Landscape with Legs, arrives at a particularly loaded cultural moment. As hyper-thin beauty standards resurface and early-2000s fashion culture reenters the spotlight, Werner’s paintings feel newly urgent. Straddling the worlds of art and fashion, her work interrogates women as objects of desire while probing the power dynamics embedded within feminine identity. These figures, both seductive and estranged, exist in a push-and-pull between agency and objectification, simultaneously embodying and resisting the systems that define them.
We caught up with Werner as she reflects on her decades-long practice, her evolving relationship to fashion imagery and the deeper psychological terrain she navigates through paint. Read on for the full interview.
The exhibition is on view from May 1 to June 12, 2026, at Anat Ebgi Gallery.
Can you tell us a bit about your career and how you started as an artist?
I started out as a dancer, studying ballet, but at 17, I decided it wasn’t right for me. Visual art wasn’t an obvious choice, even though my mom and sister both studied Fine Art. My grandmother was also a painter, so it runs in the family. My sister noticed that I was drawing all the time, and after I spent 4 years studying Liberal Arts, she encouraged me to pursue fine arts. When I finally decided to go forward with it, I did a bachelor’s and a master’s in rapid succession, and I was never happier. Painting was my first focus and I found it so fascinating and challenging that it became my obsession. It’s been that way for almost 40 years now. I still find it incredibly challenging.
You’re about to stage a solo show in New York. How does that feel? What does this moment represent for you?
This is my second solo show in New York; the last was 4 years ago and it was a huge success; it sold out, and important collectors and critics came. It was really thrilling! But the world has shifted on its axis since then. The political moment we’re living in feels traumatic and precarious, and so it’s a strange time. I’m not sure what to expect. I’m looking forward to being back in NYC, though. It’s always exciting, and I’m eager to reconnect with friends, colleagues and the gallery, and also to see lots of exhibitions. Of course, I’m hoping the show will be well-received. It’s always a bit nerve-racking because you never know what to expect, but I’m grateful for the opportunity to show this body of work.
Can you tell us a bit about your creative process?
My creative process has been consistent over the past 15 years, though the focus of the work shifts and changes. I almost always start with photographic images of figures pulled from fashion magazines. Art historical references also inform the work; for example, in this show, there are landscape elements sourced from Watteau and Caspar David Friedrich. I mix and match the images, combining them into “collage sketches.” I’m interested in the collision of images, the disjunction, where something unexpected happens. It’s like slipping on a banana peel; you’re in one place and then suddenly in another. A multitude of possible meanings and interpretations open up.
Once the collage is determined, I start the painting process, and then everything is up for grabs. A lot of unexpected things happen in the translation from photo to painting. The composition, color, tones and layers transform the photographic collage into another kind of beast. That’s the fun part, you can’t control it exactly. The materiality of the paint, its physicality and fluidity, as well as the speed of making, the hand and the brush touching the surface change how the image reads.
The show is called Landscape with Legs for obvious reasons, but I like that it’s a humorous title. I’m also using some photos of landscapes that I took myself. There is more emphasis on landscape generally here, combined with the images of figures drawn from fashion.
This showcase sits at the intersection of art and fashion. What initially drew you to fashion imagery as source material for your painting?
I fell into fashion imagery sort of by accident. Fashion isn’t something I grew up looking at or thinking about, and in fact, when I was younger, it was something I was rather dismissive of because I saw it as problematic. But I had been painting portraits from imagination without reference to photos, and I had exhausted what I knew how to do using that process. I was looking for another approach.
At that time, in the early 2000s, a multitude of magazine shops had suddenly opened. I’d moved to Montreal and was browsing in these shops when I realized that the fashion magazines were a readily available archive of images of figures. They were manifesting a variety of gestures, poses, gazes, clothing, shapes, color, tones… a whole range of visual features and characteristics that I could borrow and play with. I became fascinated by the complexity of what was going on in those photos. The evocation of desire. It was a sort of revelation, and a world of possibility for painting opened up for me through those pages. It was the gaze of the model, the sense of movement, the abstract patterns and shapes of the clothing, rather than the clothing itself, that interested me. It all tied together, their psychological and emotional qualities as well as their abstract qualities.
You balance glamor and the grotesque in your paintings. Is there a message you want people to take away?
In terms of glamor and the grotesque, yes, they often operate in dialogue in my work. I want the paintings to have depth, psychological and emotional depth. Fashion magazines are very seductive on one hand, but they are also superficial, repetitive and often seemingly empty. The models are generic, doll-like figures. They are anyone and no one. This allows me to project onto them and transform them. I try to invest them with real subjectivity, psychological and emotional life, to fill them up, so to speak. Sometimes I find distortion and the grotesque helpful to give weight to the image and complicate the reading. When they’re only glamorous, they feel quite empty to me; there has to be an edge of some kind. Often it’s a humorous edge, and the grotesque can be part of that. Sometimes there’s a bit of violence in splitting the images. It introduces a rupture and opens up the narrative.
Your subjects often resemble archetypal fashion models, thin, blonde and privileged. How do you navigate your own relationship with your body and these figures while painting them?
That’s easy, I’m not there. When I’m engaged in making a painting, I am in the process. It’s intuitive and all-consuming. The questions that come up are not about who I am in relation to this other, but who they are and what they are doing and how to make them speak. It’s fictional portraiture still. The fact that they’re archetypal fashion models demands that I alter them somehow to make them feel real and to exceed the limits of the original source material.
Recently, the modeling industry of the early 2000s has re-entered the cultural conversation, partly through renewed interest in shows like America’s Next Top Model. Do you feel your work resonates differently as people reexamine that era?
I started working with these images from fashion in the 2000s, and some of the material in my studio is from that era. I still use it and it doesn’t seem dated to me. I find the same tropes being used now, and though there is more diversity in the models, the way in which they’re performing hasn’t really changed. I sometimes choose images that harken back to the 1960s. There’s a painting in the show called “Petula” that features a figure with backcombed hair and heavy mascara. I have a nostalgia for that era, which is when my mother was in her prime. She was my icon of femininity.
Has your perception of beauty changed since working with this subject matter?
My perception of beauty hasn’t changed. I puzzle over what makes something superficially beautiful but lacking in depth and a deeper kind of beauty that is more complex and interesting. I want the paintings to be beautiful AND interesting, beautiful AND surprising, or even disturbing.
Do you have a favorite piece from the exhibition? And how do you see the subject matter evolving in the future?
I don’t like to choose favorites, but there are a couple, both small paintings with a new kind of complexity of subject and color. The smallest one is called “Skull Tree,” and there is no figure, just a yellow landscape of trees with a couple of skulls on the central branches. The landscape came from a magazine, and the skulls are Halloween decorations I saw on the way to the studio. I’m interested in how the landscapes in this show can act as counterpoints to the figures. They break the persistent appearance of this female figure that I’ve been working with for so many years and open up the narrative. The landscape offers a space of contemplation that is less graspable. It’s less familiar to me, and I’m trying to find out what the possibilities are. At the moment, the landscape is functioning for me like the unknown or the subconscious in the paintings. I’m eager to explore this idea more in future work.
