Jannis Marwitz

For Gallery Weekend Berlin, Galerie Barbara Weiss is pleased to present its first solo exhibition by Brussels-based, German-born painter Jannis Marwitz. The distinctive and perplexing visual landscape crafted by Marwitz performs a contemporary Comedia dell’arte — where characters and settings bend and shift to equally shifting narratives.

Dotted with citations from antiquity to the renaissance and beyond, Jannis Marwitz’s overwhelming visuality corresponds to a world that, paradoxically, becomes harder to grasp through the overabundance of images we encounter daily. Drawing from this reservoir to interrogate our present, the protagonists in Marwitz’s paintings meet one another on the shared visual field of the canvas. Beyond this, they often find themselves at odds with their companions, having been painted with varying approaches, palettes and compositional conventions. Marwitz’s figures are malleable, his backdrops are undulating, and the moments he depicts seem to flicker and reconstitute themselves in an ever changing flow. This openness prompts double takes and invites a continual reshuffling of understanding.