Johanna Robinson’s paintings present curious menageries of creatures and objects entangled in nebulous webs, where animate and inanimate entities collide, interchange, and comingle. Figure-stacking is a motif recurring throughout the artist’s practice, notably through subjects contorting and balancing in comical acrobatic displays. This towering into quasi-architectural forms allegorizes knowledge structures within Robinson’s work, which, through devices of humor and irony, she quite literally turns on their heads. The paintings are connected to a long lineage of women surrealist and symbolist painters which rely on imagination as a source for truth-seeking and world-building. Recent exhibitions include Wish Fulfillment, Crush Projects, New York; AmphorasamorphA, Flux Factory, Governor’s Island, curated by Sally Beauty, and The Symbolists, HESSE FLATOW, New York, curated by Nicole Kaack.