artist/ Voss

France et Allemagne

A major contemporary artist, the works of Jan Voss have been exhibited at the Center Pompidou in Paris, at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, at the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, as well as in museums in Germany, Spain , in Japan…
Born in Germany in 1936, he studied at the Munich School of Fine Arts. In 1960 he chose to settle in Paris, which is an artistic hotbed. He rubbed shoulders with Christo, Nicky de Saint Phalle, Tinguely… He taught at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris from 1987 to 1992. His curiosity and creative need led him to express himself through different mediums: paintings, engraving, sculpture, ceramics, drawing and even scenography.
Today he shares his life between Paris and Berlin.
An emblematic artist of Narrative Figuration, Jan Voss has been able to develop his own pictorial grammar, both the figure of a thought and the narration of an idea.
For him, the verb is the trigger for an imaginative scene transcribed plastically using “Vosseins hieroglyphs”. He in fact invented a style of writing, his writing, and thus imposed his personal imprint on the great book of contemporary art history.
His works retrace a story, or rather poetize a scene of life, an idea, an emotion. His plastic poems are by turns soothing, scathing or humorous. Its small characters and its figurative representations of different objects trace the lines of these poetic verses where the chromatic alexandrine imposes a sustained rhythm to deliver dark, comic or romantic rhymes. No need to be Champollion to decipher his work, because it is with our emotions and our reading codes derived from our personal history that we understand the works of this great name in contemporary art.
He puts the colors of life in his works, emotional colors that confront us with our existential questions. The simplification of his drawings combined with the surprise of the chromatic bursts preludes a very rhythmic work where the impulse of the artist’s gesture reveals the depth of a long reflection.
Sometimes fragmentary, sometimes linked by an Ariadne’s thread, we read the works of Jan Voss in a sense which is not established. Abstract or figurative forms coexist, respond to each other and take us back to pictorial spaces with strong chromatic connotations or enveloped in soft luminosity. Our eyes move across the canvas from right to left, from left to right, from top to bottom, from bottom to top… A true ocular gymnastics, a journey to the firmament of a work by a genius artist!