Jan Albers: Up & Down

The oeuvre of Jan Albers (b. Wuppertal, 1971, grew up in Namibia; lives and works in Düsseldorf), who studied with Jan Dibbets at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, is one of the central positions in today’s discourse of abstract art. Albers places as much value on the process of the genesis of his works as on their presentation. Like several other artists of his generation, he works on a contemporary conception of the picture that, instead of deriving from the painterly tradition, goes back to issues in art first raised in the 1960s. With his large-scale crayon drawings, sculptures, and "built pictures," he creates a startling universe that, at first glance, defies all categories of traditional visual habits: novel pictorial experiences between rigorous order and aesthetic luxuriance. Jan Albers has received numerous awards, including the Pollock-Krasner Award and the Goslarer Kaiserring fellowship. His art has been shown on the international stage for more than a decade. With essays by Stephan Berg, director, Kunstmuseum Bonn, and Ute Riese, curator, Kunsthalle Gießen.