"...disse sidste fotografier er placeret som nærmeste nabo til Jonna Pedersens lige så mennesketomme, men ikke karakterløse malerier fra Jyllingevej i Vanløse."
Peter Michael Hornung, Politiken

"Jonna Pedersen laver frapperende billeder af det, hun ser, og hun bearbejder sine motiver med såvel originalitet som nerve..."
Ole Lindboe, redaktør af Magasinet Kunst

"hendes talent er åbentlyst. Man kan roligt kalde hendes evne for male for et naturtalent..."
Ole Lindboe, redaktør af Magasinet Kunst

"...uhyre kraftfuldt, direkte og sanseligt. Der er ingen plads til harmløse dekorationer her, så hellere pirke til beskuerens nerve-
apparat med billeder, som satser stort..."
Tom Jørgensen, redaktør af Kunstavisen

"Jonna Pedersens kunstneriske udtryk er dybt personligt og alment berørende. Det er billeder med lige dele hjerne og hjerte. Det er billeder der tillader at stille spørgsmål."
Bjørn Ignatius Øckenholt, multikunstner og underviser

"...her kører det abstrakte og surrealistiske parløb, men ikke uden at også et stænk ekspresionisme melder sig. Det er even-tyr, det her, og disse lærreder har alt det, som et rigtigt eventyr skal have: Venlighed, humor og bag disse indlysende ting: dødsensfarlig, dyb, sort alvor. Det er flot."
Preben Winther, Kunstavisen

"...Jonna Pedersen's composition "Cold Sheets in Berlin" bespeaks the bleakness of an unsuccessful romantic assignation in Heartbreak Hotel with its simplified sink, empty mirror, and snot-green walls. Pedersen melds these unattractive seeming elements into an oddly harmonious and appealing composition by virtue of her unerring sense of the tensions inherrent in space, as well as her abillity to make essentially drab color combinations resonate emotionally. In this regard she reminds one of the group of British painters known as The Kitchen Sink School, led by John Bratby, who endeavored to capture the grimness of the postwar period.
Pedersen, however, transcends proletarian soap opera by virtue of a formal restraint that lends her compositions far more resonance."
Ed McCormack, Gallery & Studio, New York, april/maj 2006
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"...Som maler er Jonna Pedersen i fuldvægtig forstand på vej ind i de modne kunstneres rækker. Hun har en lang række udstillinger bag sig; men i kraft af en overbevisende kompositorisk begavelse, der kan sammenholdes med en næsten nervøs kontur, som underbygger det menneskelige, er hun vel efterhånden at betragte som en signifikant personlighed på en mangfoldig dansk nutidskunstscene."
Lars Svanholm, aarhus.nu
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"Jonna Pedersen er en ung kunstner, der har udviklet sig formelt med rivende hast i de få år, hun har været kunstner. Hun er værd at følge, så meget mere som hun repræsenterer noget typisk i dagens kunst. I "Thorsgade, Nørrebro, København" står farver og form i en inciterende klarhed og balance, og hun bygger tydeligt på fotos, som hun har taget af stedet. Så langt, alt godt, men så heller ikke længere. For farver og former skal klare alt selv. Virkeligheden er ved helt at forsvinde. Menneskene er væk, deres biler og cykler og barnevogne er væk, selv gadens træer er hun ikke interesseret i. Al kunst skal forenkle, men her er der ikke tale om blot en forenkling men om en sand udrensning, en tidstypisk purisme..."
Leo Tandrup, Kunstavisen

...Uden gode ting er udstillingen dog ikke. Doron Silberberg, Jørgen Minor og Bodil Krogsgaard leverer rammende humoristiske indslag, mens malere som Anne Juul Christoffersen, Jonna Pedersen, Solveig Kjær, Lars Svanholm og Peter Rothmeier Ravn kommer med komplekse og tankevækkende kommentarer til begrebet ”danskhed”.
Tom Jørgensen, redaktør af Kunstavisen


"...The first picture Jonna Pedersen ever painted was a copy of a work by the Danish Cobra artist Asger Jorn that she fell in love with in the Silkeborg Museum. For a while, earlier in her career, she worked in a similarly frenzied gestural manner, before becoming enamored of the bland facades of shops on streets devoid of people, yet somehow seemingly haunted by their absence.

The urban environment that Pedersen evokes suggests the aftermath of one of those "smart bombs" that can supposedly wipe out an entire population without destroying property - a Godsend, some might say, given the relative value of real estate over human life in today's world. Sans signs of life, everything appears pristinely undisturbed in Pedersen's paintings. But while Denmark is technically a welfare state, remnants of rampant consumerism are everywhere evident in the variety of signs plastering the storefronts.

Not knowing Danish makes them all the more intriguing, even though Pedersen supplies English titles. In "Tanning Salon," under the shopfront that says "Consol Solcenter,"  a poster in the window shows a tiny figure in a swimsuit exulting with upraised arms on a beach. Since the human presence is so rare in Pedersen's paintings, this minuscule detail seems almost spooky, a remnant of vanished natural joy embalmed in an urban mausoleum as alien as one of Yves Tanguy's surrealist boneyards.

The desolate effect is enhanced by Pedersen's meticulously detailed style, in which acrylics are employed like tempera paints to produce flat, dry-looking color areas that can appear simultaneously bright and muted. She paints every brick in an obsessive manner reminiscent of Ben Shahn's early social realist cityscapes; yet her jazzy use of commercial signage and abruptly cropped word fragments as abstract shapes recalls Stuart Davis.

Indeed, Pedersen's paintings function dynamically as geometric hard-edge abstractions, as seen in "Nord Flex," a picture of a window and door store in which the rectangles of the windows depicted on the signs rhyme visually with the actual windows in the building facade above the shopfront. The compositional tension is further heightened by the white traffic lines in the gray gutter, which contradict the two dimensional picture plane with implied perspective.

Yet to put too much emphasis on the formal attributes in the paintings of Jonna Pedersen would be to short-change their universal symbolic resonance. Not many artists, after all, can present one with a bland stucco structure called "Gastronomia Italiana," in what appears to be Danish strip-mall, and make something about its deadpan eeriness evoke the night the notorious renegade Mafioso Crazy Joey Gallo went into a place called Umberto's Clam House, in New York's Little Italy, and ended up face-down in his calamari."
Ed McCormack, Gallery & Studio, New York

This work by Jonna Pedersen is called “Fun Pops On a Stick”. You might think that the artist is interested in pure products of pop life and commercial culture, but in fact, it looks like she is most attracted to the way that the words compose themselves in mundane situations. Some things in this piece are very obvious, an obvious metaphor, in this case its a fun pop. But other words seem to be coming out of it: ok, calmi, salmi. That looks like a brand name but it also infers to the roots of words calm, soul, love.

Another piece is called “Licoriciii”. We have a package that looks like a checkerboard, it is a very simple cube shape and seems to be a carton of candies. And its simplicity has a drowsy visual quality, the checkered pattern hypnotizes you and makes you want to open that box and take a candy.

One more work is called “Portrait of a Caramel”. Chocolate coated toffee lollipops. The artist is obviously compelled by candy, sweetness, innocence, and yet commercial packaging, intentionality. These are all very minute but visually stunning images with metaphors of nationalism, stars on a blue background, red and white colors. These colors come out of heraldry, they entertain and confuse us, they also make us want to buy this pack of caramel.
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David Gibson, Curator, New York