Jan Holthoff

Jan Holthoff's paintings from the years 2024 and 2025 are presuppositionless; this is where their strength and power lie. Jan Holthoff studied under Gerhard Merz, one of the central artists of postminimalist art, and under Helmut Federle, a painter who conceptualizes painting in a radical way through energetics and formal restraint. In 2008, Jan Holthoff then studied as a master student under Herbert Brandl. The inspirations he gathered from these three led him to his own objective: to renegotiate painting. My painting is gestural, abstract, and processual; its complexity varies, he says. And that is precisely formulated, because whoever walks past these paintings, such as in the exhibition at the Duisburg Cultural Church, from which the photos of the room installations originate, sees that the canvases have nothing serial about them; rather, the 2024 paintings are very reduced, almost contemplative in design, expansive in their combination of color field painting and expressivity. In 2025, Jan Holthoff now shatters this system, works less with transparency, and instead employs individual opaque surfaces that resist the inner chaos like stop signals. This is very good painting,