Jan Holthoff

Frozen Gestures – Jan Holthoff’s pictures of the years 2024 and 2025 presuppose nothing, and that is what makes for their strength and power. Jan Holthoff studied with Gerhard Merz, one of the central artists of post-Minimalist art, and with Helmut Federle, one of those painters who think painting radically from energetics and formal restraint. In 2008 Jan Holthoff then studied with Herbert Brandl as a Meisterschüler. The impulses he took from these three led him to an aim of his own: “to renegotiate painting.” “My painting is gestural, abstract and processual, the complexity varies,” he says. And that is precisely put, for anyone who paces along these pictures – as in the exhibition at the Kulturkirche in Duisburg, from which the photographs of the room installations come – sees that the canvases in fact have nothing serial about them; rather, the pictures of 2024 are very reduced, almost contemplative in conception, expansive in their combination of colour field painting and expressiveness. In 2025 Jan Holthoff bursts this system apart, working less with transparency and instead deploying individual opaque areas that withstand the inner chaos like stop signals. This is very good painting, addressing a dialectic of impressiveness, variability and their possible disappearance, a disappearance that almost the whole of humanity is currently experiencing on small screens.

Exhibition:
Galerie Wittenbrink, Munich: 15/1–15/3/2026