Axel Geis b. 1970

Wentrup Gallery presents 'Kult und Amore,' the seventh solo exhibition by Berlin-based artist Axel Geis. In his latest paintings, the human figure takes center stage. Geis does not use a...

Wentrup is excited to present Papiersalon in the gallery at Feenteich for the first time. On view are works by Phoebe Boswell, Jenny Brosinski, André Butzer, Axel Geis, Karl Haendel,...

The overarching theme in Axel Geis oeuvre is painting. Painting not only as a medium but primarily in the form of the technique, i.e., the application of wet colors by...

A group exhibition during the first COVID-19 lockdown, including Nevin Aladag, Hicham Berrada, Miriam Böhm, Louisa Clement, Mariechen Danz, Axel Geis, Thomas Grünfeld, Karl Haendel, Gregor Hildebrandt, John McAllister, Florian...

The group exhibition Papier.Salon. combines a selected variety of drawings with modern furniture, featuring works by Sol Calero, Jean Cocteau, William Copley, Mariechen Danz, Peter Doig, Marcel van Eeden, Debo...

The approach is at once both personal and richly referential. First Axel Geis photographs his own chandelier from seven different angles, then he creates paintings based on the photos —...

We take pleasure in announcing the second exhibition of works by Axel Geis at Galerie Jan Wentrup, which will open on September 30, 2006. On this occasion, the first catalog about the artist will be published.

Since his first exhibition at the end of 2004, Geis has been able to establish himself successfully, and his paintings have attracted considerable art-critical attention. His works are today not only in important international private collections, but also in the public collections of the Saarland Museum in Saarbrücken and the Kunsthalle Mannheim. Furthermore, until October 22, the Kunsthalle Mannheim is also hosting a special exhibition of Geis’ works as part of the show Full House—Gesichter einer Sammlung.

In November, paintings by Geis will be on view at Fondazione Mudime in Milano. In his oil paintings, Axel Geis (born 1970) addresses the human figure. In undefined or only sparingly equipped visual spaces, these figures have a presence that is difficult to determine. His paintings are characterized by an atmosphere somewhere between familiar and strange. The portraits of individual people or, recently, also groups of people, seem strangely removed or, when they look directly at the beholder, focused only on themselves.
In the catalog, the Berlin art historian Sven Beckstette writes: „Obviously, for Geis the human figure is at the centre of his work. But the point for him is not copying a model. The pictures are always painted on the basis of reproductions. Apart from family photographs or photographs staged by himself, it is also film stills that can serve as a point of departure for the paintings. A systematic procedure behind the selection of what is to be painted cannot be assumed. Geis, for example, does not search through a filmic canon or specific genres, rather, his subjects are based on accidental finds, without any attention to their artistic or film historical value. [...]
So even if Geis takes film images as points of departure for some of his paintings, he nonetheless does not belong to those artists who since the 1970s have been working on topics related to the cinema, its aesthetics and mechanisms. Star cult, optics, production methods, and the iconography of film do not interest him, that much is certain. The images of the cinema offer the immediate occasion for the painting, but are not a reason for an intense engagement with the cinema itself. If we look more closely at Geis’ treatment of his models, regardless of whether they come from films or photographs, then it becomes clear that through the transfer into painting a process of abstraction takes place in which the sources are disguised.“

In his oil-paintings of small and medium format Axel Geis (born 1970) deals with the human figure in a constantly undefined and entirely pictorial space. Because of this, the figure gets a presence difficult to characterize. The paintings are accompanied by a silence tipping between intimacy and strangeness. The people shown in entire or half-figure portraits seem to be in a state of rapture and even if they are looking at the viewer they always remain introspective.

Figurative painting, which makes use of magazine pictures, is in opposition to the concept of using a private, intimate pictorial repertoire. Family slides and fotos serve as models for Geis’ work in many cases. A man in an army-parka is the artist’s father during his military service as a mountain infantryman, a clown in a harlequin cotume is his brother dressed up for carnival in the early 1970’s. Due to their missing pictorial context the people shown surpass the private sphere and reach a more general view of humaninty. In his works, closely related to traditional painting, Axel Geis continues the genre of portraiture and its interelationship of inside and outside.

Geis turns to the individual’s role in contemporary art. The painted figure and its face get caught up in the maelstrom of a imbalanced perception - reason for Baudrillard to talk about the “fraktale Subjekt”. Besides figures, which refer to photographic models, the artist also shows invented figures. These paintings emphazise less the portrait’s role as physionomical and psychological image, but turn to the perception, function and individuality of pictures in a basic, fundamental way.