Janus Hochgesand

About Janus Hochgesand

High intensity paintings: That’s what Janus Hochgesand calls his abstract artworks, where surfaces, structures, and textures are the main protagonists. As a former sculptor who studied under Tobias Rehberger and others at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, Hochgesand uses paint as a material in that tactile sense, and he seeks out his own methods of shaping it. In his studio, which seems more like an experimental laboratory, there is not a brush nor an easel to be found. Instead, he moves himself across the canvas, even using his shoes as a working material.

Janus Hochgesand, born in Dierdorf in 1981, studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe under Prof. Andreas Slominski from 2002 to 2004, at the Esmeralda Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado (E.N.P.E.G.) in Mexiko City under Prof. Sofia Taboas in 2005, and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt under Prof. Tobias Rehberger from 2005 to 2009. He has received numerous prizes and grants, including the Hamburg travel grant from the Burkhard-Vernunft residency in Torria (2018), the Rheinland-Pfalz grant for the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2011), and the Städelschule graduate prize in 2009. Since 2005 his work has been shown at exhibitions regularly. He has been living and working in Hamburg since 2010.