Robert Janitz

Robert Janitz (born 1962) is a German-born painter working in New York City. He is known for his large abstract paintings that employ oil in combination with gesso, egg, or wax and flour, on a monochrome background. In addition to New York, he has had solo exhibitions in Paris, Berlin, Brussels, London and Providence, Rhode Island, and, among other cities in France, Saint Etienne and Valenciennes. He has participated in group shows at Canada Gallery and the Emily Harvey Foundation in New York, London's Lisson Gallery, and in Luxembourg, Paris, Rome, Miami, and Buenos Aires. Janitz's work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Die Welt, the New Yorker, the New York Observer, Artforum among other places. He is represented by Team Gallery in the US and Meyer Riegger gallery in Europe.

Background / education

He was born in Alsfeld, in Hesse, Germany, 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.

Early career and teaching

He lived and worked in France from 1994 to 2008, serving as a lecturer in Visual Arts at University of Paris VIII. In 2009, he taught at the Ecole Superieure Beaux Arts in Cherbourg, France. Having felt confined by the prevailing ideas about painting in the country, however, he moved to New York in 2009.

Work

Janitz is known for his large abstractions that employ oil in combination with gesso, egg, or wax and flour, on a monochrome background, 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." Will Heinrich of the Observer, describes the six canvases Janitz made for his 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."

Janitz's second series of abstractions depict the backs of people's heads, his take, he has said, on the human condition, "They create a room of absence that becomes a room of presence."

His 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 sculptures are oversized, and recall the fountains he saw during his time in Paris.

Books

• Hudson, Suzanne, Painting Now, Thames & Hudson, 2015.
• Ex Libris (monograph), Rainoff, 2014. ISBN 978-0-9806516-9-0.
• Agboton-Jumeau, Jean-Charles and Cyroulnik, Philippe, Robert Janitz (monograph), Le 10 Neuf, 2006. ISBN 978-2-35075-023-1.

• "Painting Now: Suzanne Hudson". Thames & Hudson. Retrieved Feb 20, 2015. 
• "Robert Janitz: Ex Libris". Rainoff. Retrieved Feb 20, 2015. 
• "Robert Janitz". librairieflammarion.fr. Le 10 Neuf. 

Other work / personal life

He acted in his friends, New York artists Erik Moskowitz + Amanda Trager's videos, Cloud Cuckoo Land (2008) and Two Russians in the Free World (2013, 2014), which have been shown internationally. He has been studying Buddhism with Chögyam Trungpa and Zen archery with Kanjuro Shibata in the US, France, and Germany since 1982.