Robert Janitz

Robert Janitz (born 1962) is a German-born painter working in New York City and Mexico City. He is known for his large abstract paintings that employ oil in combination with wax and flour, on a monochrome background.

In addition to New York, he has had solo exhibitions in Paris, Berlin, Brussels, London, Los Angeles, Seoul, Mexico City, Istanbul and Providence, Rhode Island, and, among other cities in France, at the Château de Kerguéhennec, Saint Etienne^[1] and Valenciennes. He has participated in group exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, the Emily Harvey Foundation in New York,^[2] the Magazzino d'Arte Moderna in Rome, the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, Italy, and in Luxembourg, London,^[3] Paris, Buenos Aires, and Miami.^[4] Janitz's work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Die Welt, the New Yorker, and Artforum, among other places.^[4][5]

His works are part of the permanent collections of the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, France; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art[1], San Francisco, USA; Amorepacific Museum of Art [2], Seoul, South Korea; the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia[3]; Hall Art Foundation[4], Reading, VT, USA.

He is represented by CANADA New York City, KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin, Seoul and SAENGER GALERIA, Mexico City.

He was born in Alsfeld, in Hesse, Germany,^[6] and studied Sanskrit, art history, and comparative religions at University of Marburg in Marburg, Hesse. He holds an MA in Sanskrit. He also studied papermaking under artist Katharina Eitel in Marburg for two years, from 1991 to 1992.

He lived and worked in France^[7] from 1994 to 2008, serving as a lecturer in Visual Arts at University of Paris VIII. He had his first solo show in Paris in 1996 at the Galerie Elizabeth Valleix: "Huiles sur toile” was an exhibition of small figurative paintings.

In 2009, Janitz taught at the Ecole Superieure Beaux Arts in Cherbourg, France.^[8] Having felt confined by the prevailing ideas about painting in the country, however, he moved to New York in 2009.^[9]

Janitz is currently known for his large abstractions that employ oil in combination with wax and flour, on a monochrome background,^[7] linen. Author of Thames & Hudson's Painting Now Suzanne Hudson writes that his strokes "evoke the repetitive actions involved in window washing, spackling, or grouting." Janitz also compared the surface in one group in this series to the buttering of bread. He works with inexpensive brushes bought at the hardware store, which he likes for being "very workmanlike" and preventing a certain level of pictorialism, allowing his work to "just stay painted."^[9] Will Heinrich of the Observer, describes the six canvases in Janitz's first solo show at Team Galley as "hung edge to edge like successive states of a single etching. But that's also the best way to highlight subtle variations." He also wrote the painter does "real work" on his surfaces at a time where he feels there is "an epidemic of protective coloration."^[10]

The artist's next series of abstractions depict the backs of people's heads. He told the artblog Painter's Bread "You can think of it as a third person narrative in literature or a Brechtian distantiation as the ultimate position of the Dandy." In the action of painting this series, he also said that he imagines a real person in the painting.^[11] TimeOut New York's Howard Halle described the activity on the 25 x 20-inch panels as "broad, gestural knots."^[12] The Art Market Monitor picked the show among the three it recommended the first week of October 2015, writing "Janitz plays and subverts the idea of codes, social codes that determine how we should approach one another, as well as painterly codes, that regulate the classifications of portraiture."^[13] Hudson for Artforum noted the deconstructive activity in this work and of the eerie overall effect of taking in the exhibition: "Standing amid a room full of eyeless totems is an oddly disconcerting experience, one that, for me anyhow, gave rise to the fantasy that they were gazing into a void."^[14]

Janitz's plant sculptures emerged from including an actual plant in an exhibition in Brussels. He had been looking for a practice akin to painting, and made a model for an exhibition in New York and ended up liking the model itself. The metal sculptures are oversized,^[14][15] and recall the fountains he saw during his time in Paris.^[9]

In his 2017 series of paintings, unveiled at Team gallery's Los Angeles space, Janitz broke away from his usual monochrome background and used a different palette of bright pastels and neons—still made with oil, wax, and flour—inspired by the city's man-made landscapes. The work exhibits the artist's interest in inorganic life for the series, how super hot plasma turns cosmic dust particles to act lifelike. The curtain-like forms also belie strokes that the artist allowed to converge inwards rather than squaring off at the canvas' edge as before.

In addition, Janitz made an accompanying audio piece for the exhibition, a chiming noise triggered by a motion detector upon one's entry into the gallery. The sound is taken from the 1972 BBC documentary short, Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles,^[16] in the segments signaling the narrative of the "Baede-Kar," the British architectural historian's conceit in the film of his L.A. car acting as a Baedeker German travel guide.^[17]

Beginning in 2021, Janitz presented a series of site-specific exhibitions in architecturally significant spaces, each testing whether painting could enter genuine dialogue with architecture carrying its own historical or sensory charge — and whether such encounters might expose the "white cube" gallery's supposed neutrality as a construction rather than a given.

Best of All Worlds at Casa Gilardi, the late masterwork of Luis Barragán (1975–77), was curated by Gianni Jetzer, who observed that where Barragán dematerializes architecture into light and space, Janitz materializes architectural shapes in paint.^[18] The show marked Janitz's debut in Latin America.

Janitz was the inaugural artist-in-residence at the Sevil Dolmacı Art Residency in Istanbul. The resulting exhibition, The Labyrinth, opened at Villa İpranosyan, Istanbul in November 2021 — his first solo show in Turkey — installed within a richly ornamented landmarked nineteenth-century villa.^[19]

A major installation at the Museo Diego Rivera Anahuacalli, curated by Karla Niño de Rivera, integrated large-format paintings and sculptures into Diego Rivera's Mesoamerican-inspired structure of volcanic stone — Janitz's first exhibition in a Latin American museum.^[20] Janitz stated that his Mexican work had shifted toward active collaboration with each space's architecture, away from what he called "the screen of the white cube."

Presented at the deconsecrated seventeenth-century church of San Carlo in Cremona, September 2022 to January 2023, organized by artist Servane Mary as part of her ongoing San Carlo Cremona site-specific program.^[21][22] Janitz designed a temporary arched structure running the length of the nave — recalling a Roman aqueduct — suspending twelve paintings: six black-and-white on one side, six in color on the other. The title paraphrases Carmina Burana; burrata introduces a note of comic materialism into the dialogue between painting and sacred space.

Presented at Casa Siza — designed by Álvaro Siza on the preserved ruins of a nineteenth-century residence in Mexico City's Santa María la Ribera neighborhood — organized by Saenger Galería in October 2024.^[23] The works explored brushstrokes simultaneously autonomous and suggestive of Popocatépetl's plume, a head, or pure gesture.

The inaugural exhibition of Kunstraum Heilig Geist am UNESCO-Welterbe Zollverein in Essen, April 2025, curated by Ulrich Wilmes, former chief curator of Haus der Kunst, Munich, with an accompanying artist talk.^[24] The venue completed the sequence's arc: from Barragán's chromatic modernism through Ottoman domestic grandeur, pre-Columbian monumentalism, Italian Baroque, and Portuguese rationalism to the industrial heritage of the Ruhr.

Across the five exhibitions, Janitz proposed that the white cube is not a neutral given but a historically produced frame that isolates the work and accelerates its commodification. Placing his abstractions in dialogue with Barragán's colored walls, Rivera's volcanic stone, a Baroque church nave, a Pritzker laureate's ruin-built gallery, and a deconsecrated industrial church, he argued that painting is not diminished by strong architectural context but activated by it.

• Robert Janitz at Anahuacalli (monograph), Kettler Verlag, Dortmund, 2024. ISBN 978-3987410901^[25]
• Robert Janitz — Best of All Worlds, Saenger Editores, Mexico City, 2022. ISBN 978-607-98345-7-9^[26]
• Hudson, Suzanne, Contemporary Painting, Thames & Hudson, 2021. ISBN 978-0500294635^[27]
• Robert Janitz: Made in New York (monograph), Distanz Verlag, Berlin, 2020. ISBN 978-3-95476-331-3^[28]
• Ed. Konrad Bitterli, Andrea Lutz, Lynn Kost, Frozen Gesture, Hirmer Verlag, Munich, 2019. ISBN 978-3-7774-3269-4^[29]
• Nickas, Bob, Geometria figurativa / Figurative Geometry, Silvana Editoriale, 2017. ISBN 88-366-3680-2^[30]
• Hudson, Suzanne, Painting Now, Thames & Hudson, 2015.^[31]
• Ex Libris (monograph), Rainoff, 2014. ISBN 978-0-9806516-9-0^[32]
• Agboton-Jumeau, Jean-Charles and Cyroulnik, Philippe, Robert Janitz (monograph), Le 10 Neuf, Paris, 2006. ISBN 978-2-35075-023-1^[33]

He acted in New York artists Erik Moskowitz + Amanda Trager's videos, Cloud Cuckoo Land (2008) and Two Russians in the Free World (2013–14), which have been shown internationally.^[34][35] He has been studying Buddhism with Chögyam Trungpa and Zen archery with Kanjuro Shibata in the US, France, and Germany since 1982.

• "Ein Besuch bei Robert Janitz, einem der angesagtesten bildenden Künstler in Mexiko-Stadt." ARD Kulturleben, Bayern 2 / ARD Audiothek, 21 May 2025
• 2025 article in Tussle Magazine
• 2025 interview on Yale University Radio
• 2022 article in Juliet Art Magazine, Italy
• 2022 article in AD Magazine
• 2022 article in The Brooklyn Rail
• 2021 article in The New York Times T Magazine
• 2019 article in The Brooklyn Rail
• 2017 article in Blouin ArtInfo
• 2015 article by Suzanne Hudson in Artforum
• 2015 article in Coeval Magazine
• 2014 article in Die Welt
• 2014 interview by Eric Sutphin in ArtCritical
• 2014 interview by Noah Dillon in ArtCritical
• 2013 interview in Painter's Bread