ArtistVoss, Jan

Artist Years1936-living

Artist NationalityGerman

TitleUntitled Composition with Collage

Year1985

MediumCollage

DimensionsCompositi: 9 X 13.5 inches

Accession NumberRC1751

NotesJan Vossis a German painter, watercolorist, sculptor, ceramist and engraver living in France.

Jan Voss is fleeing the family home and finds himself in Turkey by hitchhiking. He stayed there for six months. His father sent him a train ticket for the return. He enrolled at the Munich Fine Arts Academy where he studied from 1956 to 1960. It was the drawings he reported from Turkey that allowed him to run for the academy's competition.

In 1960, having obtained a scholarship to spend a year abroad, he chose to come and live in Paris. From 1960 to 1972, he regularly exhibited alongside other artists belonging to the group of the C narrative Figuration. In 1964 he made a series of drawings which he called La Vie Parisienne and made his first Parisian solo exhibition at the Galerie du Fleuve.

Located between Paris and Berlin, he taught from 1966 to 1967 at the Hamburg Higher School of Fine ArtsHambourg. In 1987, he was appointed professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he taught until 19921992.

His work attempts to account for a daily reality by inventing small stories in his paintings featuring animals, characters. It adds up, superimposes on the usual objects, animals, plants, silhouettes of men and women.

His work is gradually departing from the influence of Narrative Figuration. His works, "lineds", are saturated with black signs and watercoloured lines. From the 1980s, he added new materials to his works and produced small sculptures (totems, stacks of cubes...).

Jan Voss is also an engraver and has worked on lithography and xylography
(source: wkipedia.org)