Joanna Wolthuizen — Biography
Joanna Wolthuizen (b. Melbourne, Australia) is an Australian contemporary artist recognised internationally for advancing hard-edge abstraction into a new visual movement she defines as Composed Abstraction™ — a discipline of geometrical emotional architecture where colour, proportion, and stillness converge.
Her large-scale paintings inhabit the threshold between architecture and emotion, precision and poetry. Through calibrated proportion, spatial rhythm, and chromatic restraint, Wolthuizen constructs compositions of equilibrium — works that are architectonic yet profoundly human. Her practice transforms geometry into language and colour into composure.
Collected internationally, her paintings reside in private, corporate, and architectural collections across Australia, Europe, and North America. Each work embodies structural clarity and emotional depth, designed to inhabit and define contemporary environments with poise, serenity, and enduring presence.
⸻
Education and Early Formation
Born and based in Melbourne, Wolthuizen’s creative foundation was shaped through an early multidisciplinary education. She first studied at the Melbourne College of Art, Design & Photography, where she explored photography, ceramics, printmaking, industrial illustration, live drawing, and graphic design.
She went on to complete a Bachelor of Multidisciplinary Design at Monash University, an interdisciplinary program spanning graphic design, media, art history, industrial design, drawing, interior design, and architecture.
Initially drawn to interior design and architecture, Wolthuizen’s practice evolved from structural exploration toward emotional abstraction. Her lifelong interest in psychology and visual perception informs her ongoing investigation into balance, consciousness, and spatial harmony — seeking to understand how geometry can hold feeling and how composure itself can become a form of communication.
⸻
Movement: Composed Abstraction™
Composed Abstraction™ marks a new chapter in the evolution of hard-edge abstraction — transforming it from a modernist pursuit of reduction into a contemporary language of composure, emotion, and psychological resonance. Founded by Joanna Wolthuizen, the movement reinterprets geometry as emotional architecture and abstraction as an act of alignment.
Where early modernism sought purity of form, Composed Abstraction™ seeks equilibrium — between structural rhythm and emotional intelligence, between external order and inner stillness. It extends the legacies of Minimalism, Lyrical Abstraction, and Constructivism into a refined synthesis defined by restraint, proportion, and atmosphere.
In Wolthuizen’s practice, geometry becomes sentient; colour becomes breath; and space becomes a vessel for reflection. Each painting is a meditative structure — a compositional architecture of emotion distilled to its most resonant balance.
The movement’s philosophical foundation lies in the belief that art can restore composure in an age of noise and acceleration — that proportion and rhythm can recalibrate perception toward stillness.
⸻
Writing and Parallel Practice
Alongside her visual practice, Wolthuizen is an accomplished writer whose poetry and short fiction have been published in three literary journals, including Mountain Press Quarterly (USA), Regime Journal (Australia), and Tincture Literary Journal (Australia).
Her short story “Beside the Loneliness of Others” appeared in Mountain Press Quarterly (USA) — a quiet study of human isolation and empathy, observed through proximity and micro-detail. Her story “Listen to the Rhythm” was published in Regime Journal, where her painting was also featured on the cover. In Blink, her prose explored a woman’s perception of the world through colour and emotion — a thematic echo of her visual language.
This cross-disciplinary sensibility — where visual structure meets literary interiority — underpins the emotional precision of Wolthuizen’s visual work. Her writing and painting share a single compositional logic: the search for stillness within complexity, and the expression of emotion through proportion, silence, and design.
⸻
Collections
• Private collections in Melbourne, Sydney, London, New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin
• Corporate and architectural commissions across Australia and Europe
• Featured in cultural and executive interiors where art defines atmosphere and identity
⸻
Selected Projects
• Meridian (2025) — Private Collection, Sydney
• Continuum Diptych (2025) — Studio Collection, Melbourne
• The Pyrmont Foyer Project (2024) — Corporate Commission, Sydney
• Todds London Foyer Project (2024) — Corporate Commission, London
• Medala Australia HQ (2023) — Corporate Collection, Victoria
• Buxton HQ Retail Project (2023) — Corporate Commission, Victoria
• The Bricks & Mortar HQ Foyer Project 2 (2023) — Corporate Commission, Victoria
• Orloff Group Foyer Project (2011) — Corporate Commission
• Constructivism Diptych (2024) — Private Collection, Victoria
⸻
