After playing a piano concert in Tokyo in 1976, Keith Jarrett gave an encore. On the spot, he improvised a piece that lasts no longer than nine minutes, and within this condensed, intuitively driven piece the musician gropes for emotions as pure joy, tenderness to grief and love. 

In the past ten years Jannie Regnerus has had no exhibitions, as she was expressing her artistic work in the literary field by writing six novels. Recently she turned back to painting again, the medium she started her practice as a young artist, and Tokyo Encore is her first solo show after a decade-long hiatus in the visual arts. 

In her new series of paintings, Regnerus evokes the atmosphere and light of the landscape she grew up with in the north of the Netherlands, a place so vast that there is ‘no end to the eye’.  Her abstract minimalistic paintings appear as condensed carriers of this vastness and light, in a wide variety of time of day and season. Glowing colour fields, fading tones, reminiscent of the melancholic darkness of late evening, a cool morning light in winter, the warm glow light of summer afternoon. Even when the painting is finished, its colours remain in dialogue to daylight, changing subtly throughout the day.

Jannie Regnerus is a writer and a visual artist. She was born in Oudebildtzijl, the Netherlands, and lives and works in Haarlem. She studied at the Kunstacademie in Maastricht and participated at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten between 1995-96. Between 2000 and 2001 she did a residency at the CCA Kitakyushu, Japan. Her novels De ent, Het lam and Nachtschrijver have been critically acclaimed. Het lam was on the longlist of the Libris Literatuur Prijs. Her latest publication is Het wolkenpaviljoen (2020) was also long-listed. As a painter and photographer she has participated in many group exhibitions in Europe and Japan.