Axel Geis

Axel Geis's figurative paintings are celebrated for their exceptional intimacy and their references to 19th-century French and Spanish painting traditions. He creates his works from reproductions such as film stills, photographs, and images found on Instagram. His figures often appear to float on the canvas, encircled by visible brushstrokes in muted or earthy tones while frequently set against backgrounds that suggest a sense of incompletion.

Axel Geis was born in 1970 in Limburg an der Lahn. He lives and works in Berlin.

Institutional solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Mannheim, DE | Kunstverein Dillingen, DE | Kunstverein Trier, DE. He has participated in group exhibitions at Villa Schöningen, Potsdam, DE | Künstlerhaus Palais Thurn und Taxis, Bregenz, AT | Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, DE | National Museum of Art, Bucharest, RO | Arp Museum, Remagen, DE | Centre Pomidou, Paris, FR | Portland Art Museum, US | Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, Miami, US.

His works are held in the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, FR | Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, FR | Florence and Daniel Guerlain Collection, Paris, FR | Collection of Contemporary Art of the Federal Government of Germany, DE | Kunsthalle Mannheim, DE | Saarland Museum, Saarbrücken, DE | Jil Sander Collection, DE | Rubell Family Collection, Miami, US.

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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.“