Jannis Marwitz

Dense with materials, paint, art history, and anomalies, the paintings of Jannis Marwitz have a precision that would not exist without the intensive drawing work he conducts in parallel. Executed in ink, his sketches recall the preliminary sheets produced by classical painters. They show anatomical sections of a horse’s head, of the head of a cow along with other horse studies, and of a dog, to which a tree motif and several figures have been added. In contrast to his paintings, Marwitz’s drawings do not follow any clearly discernible composition; instead, the motifs appear alongside each other, pushed together from various directions and spreading out across the entire surface of the paper. The effect is striking; one might think these sketches come from the seventeenth century. This stylistic anachronism should not be taken too seriously, however. For if it speaks of a love of a precise depiction of the world, it also reflects a desire to convey the simultaneity of time in the era of the endless reproduction and distribution of images.