The Echo of the Spirit Through the Rhythms of Life celebrates the art of Louise Janin (1893-1997), an American born artist who spent the majority of her life in France.

Bringing together rare paintings, works on paper, and archival material, the exhibition offers a timely and long-overdue reassessment of Janin’s contribution to the history of art and her place within the recent re-evaluation of overlooked visionary women artists.

Spanning an incredible eighty-year career, Janin’s practice evolved at the intersection of art, music, science, and spirituality. Rejecting traditional representation of the visible world, her paintings move beyond conventional figuration, harmoniously entwining familiar elements with rhythmic abstract forms that are suggestive of unseen cosmic forces. The result is an enigmatic and immersive visual language that expands perception, opening a portal to alternative realities.

The works on display trace Janin’s evolution from early Symbolist-inflected drawings to the vibrant abstract paintings of her later career, reflecting a lifelong engagement with spiritual philosophy, non-Western art forms, and the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. She exhibited widely across Europe during the 1920s and 1930s and was associated with the Paris-based Musicaliste movement, developing a deeply experimental approach to painting rooted in rhythm, harmony, and movement.

Treating the canvas as a site of resonance rather than representation, her paintings operate as visual musical compositions, temporal, immersive, and attuned to sensation. Janin’s work belongs to a broader lineage of artists seeking to materialise the immaterial. The paintings suggest a universe in constant flux and dissolving boundaries between the physical and metaphysical.

The exhibition places particular emphasis on Janin’s remarkable cosmogrammes, developed after the Second World War. Emerging through processes of chance and material interaction, these works were created by allowing pigment to disperse across liquid surfaces, producing forms that evoke nebulae, microscopic organisms, and unknown cosmic systems. In these works, matter itself appears active, generating images that feel less composed than revealed. Here Janin demonstrates an alchemical nature to her work.