Joanna Bavero received her MFA at Stony Brook University in 2014 and her BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2007.
Joanna has shown in both group and solo exhibitions in galleries such as Gristle Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, The Cotton Candy Machine in Brooklyn, NY, The Richard Demato Gallery in Sag Harbor, NY, Gallery North, (curated by Phillip Pearlstein) in East Setauket, NY, The Angel Orensanz Foundation for Contemporary Art in New York City and The Paul Zuccaire Gallery in Stony Brook, NY. She has been featured in publications and online galleries such as the International Emerging Artist Awards, Studio Visit Magazine and Direct Art Magazine. Bavero is a member of the Grrrl Art Collective with other featured artists such as Linnea Strid, Brandi Read and Gigi Chen.
Artist Statement
My work explores female sexuality as a space where pleasure, power, shame, desire, vulnerability, and control overlap. I use beauty and sensuality to invite the viewer in, then introduce moments of tension that complicate that attraction. I am interested in how our responses to sexuality are shaped by culture, expectation, and personal experience.
The paintings and drawings live inside contradiction: empowerment and submission, intimacy and exposure, pleasure and pain. Their overlap is where the work becomes most honest. Earlier in my practice, sexuality was often filtered through shame. This body of work comes from a different place. It is less interested in apology and more interested in appetite, freedom, and self-expression. It grows directly from lived experience and from rejecting the idea that female desire must be softened, hidden, or made acceptable for someone else.
Ultimately, the work is about the freedom to exist within contradiction: to experience pleasure without shame, vulnerability without weakness, and sexuality without asking permission. My aim is for it to be beautiful enough to seduce and direct enough to unsettle. If a painting makes someone question why they are comfortable with desire in one form but threatened by it in another, then it has done its job.