Jan Holthoff

Frozen Gestures

Jan Holthoff's paintings of the years 2024 and 2025 are unconditional, which is what gives them their strength and power. Jan Holthoff studied under Gerhard Merz, one of the central artists of post-minimalist art, and Helmut Federle, one of the painters who radically conceptualised painting in terms of energy and formal restraint. In 2008, Jan Holthoff studied with Herbert Brandl as a master student. The inspiration he gained from these three led him to set his own goals: "to renegotiate painting". "My painting is gestural, abstract and processual, the complexity varies," he says. And that is precisely formulated, because anyone who walks through these paintings, such as in the exhibition in the Duisburg Kulturkirche, from which the photographs of the room installations originate, sees that the canvases actually have nothing serial about them, rather the paintings from 2024 are very reduced, almost contemplative, expansive in their combination of colour field painting and expressiveness. In 2025, Jan Holthoff now breaks with this system, working less with transparency and instead using individual opaque areas that resist the inner chaos like stop signals. This is very good painting that thematises a dialectic of impressiveness, variability and their possible disappearance, a disappearance that almost all of humanity is currently experiencing on small screens.

Exhibition:
Gallery Wittenbrink, Munich: 15/1-15/3/2026