Name Robert Janitz | ||
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Movies Two Russians in the Free World | ||
Robert Janitz (born 1962) is a German-born painter working in New York City. He is known for his large abstract paintings that employ oil in combination with gesso, egg, or wax and flour, on a monochrome background.
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In addition to New York, he has had solo exhibitions in Paris, Berlin, Brussels, London and Providence, Rhode Island, and, among other cities in France, Saint Etienne and Valenciennes. He has participated in group shows at Canada Gallery and the Emily Harvey Foundation in New York, London's Lisson Gallery, and in Luxembourg, Paris, Rome, Miami, and Buenos Aires. Janitz's work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Die Welt, the New Yorker, the New York Observer, and Artforum among other places.
He is represented by Team Gallery in the US and Meyer Riegger gallery in Europe.
Background / education
He was born in Alsfeld, in Hesse, Germany, and studied Sanskrit, art history, and comparative religions at University of Marburg in Marburg, Hesse. He holds an MA in Sanskrit. He also studied papermaking under artist Katharina Eitel in Marburg for two years, from 1991 to 1992.
Early career and teaching
He lived and worked in France from 1994 to 2008, serving as a lecturer in Visual Arts at University of Paris VIII. In 2009, he taught at the Ecole Superieure Beaux Arts in Cherbourg, France. Having felt confined by the prevailing ideas about painting in the country, however, he moved to New York in 2009.
Work
Janitz is known for his large abstractions that employ oil in combination with gesso, egg, or wax and flour, on a monochrome background, linen. Author of Thames & Hudson's Painting Now Suzanne Hudson writes that his strokes "evoke the repetitive actions involved in window washing, spackling, or grouting." Janitz also compared the surface in one group in this series to the buttering of bread. He works with inexpensive brushes bought at the hardware store, which he likes for being "very workmanlike" and preventing a certain level of pictorialism, allowing his work to "just stay painted." Will Heinrich of the Observer, describes the six canvases Janitz made for his first solo show at Team Galley as "hung edge to edge like successive states of a single etching. But that’s also the best way to highlight subtle variations." He also wrote the painter does "real work" on his surfaces at a time where he feels there is "an epidemic of protective coloration."
Janitz's second series of abstractions depict the backs of people's heads, his take, he has said, on the human condition, "They create a room of absence that becomes a room of presence." TimeOut New York's Howard Halle described these as "broad, gestural knots" and with painters Lisa Beck, Stanley Whitney, Mathew Cerletty, and others, wrote that Janitz "concentrate[s] on first principles, knowing that painting will thrive regardless of what direction society takes." The Art Market Monitor picked his show among the three it recommended the first week of October 2015, writing "Janitz plays and subverts the idea of codes, social codes that determine how we should approach one another, as well as painterly codes, that regulate the classifications of portraiture."
His plant sculptures emerged from including an actual plant in an exhibition in Brussels. He had been looking for a practice akin to painting, and made a model for an exhibition in New York and ended up liking the model itself. The metal sculptures are oversized, and recall the fountains he saw during his time in Paris.
In his third series of paintings, unveiled in 2017 in Team gallery's Los Angeles space, Janitz broke away from his usual monochrome background and used a different palette of pastels and neons--made still with oil, wax, and flour--inspired by the city's man-made landscapes. The work exhibits the artist's interest in inorganic life for the series, how super hot plasma turns cosmic dust particles to act lifelike. The curtain-like forms also belie strokes that the artist allowed to converge inwards rather than squaring off at the canvas' edge as before.
In addition, Janitz made an accompanying audio piece for the exhibition, a chiming noise triggered by a motion detector upon one's entry into the gallery. The sound is taken from the 1972 short BBC documentary, Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, in the segments signaling the narrative of the "Baede-Kar," the British architectural historian's conceit in the film of his L.A. car acting as a Baedeker German travel guide.
Books
Other work / personal life
He acted in his friends, New York artists Erik Moskowitz + Amanda Trager's videos, Cloud Cuckoo Land (2008) and Two Russians in the Free World (2013-14), which have been shown internationally. He has been studying Buddhism with Chögyam Trungpa and Zen archery with Kanjuro Shibata in the US, France, and Germany since 1982.