Jürgen Jansen’s paintings emerge from an interplay between directed movement and the autonomous behaviour of materials. Working on a horizontally positioned support, he pours, layers, tilts and moves oil paint, pigments and resins until transparent pictorial spaces of intense sensuous presence begin to form. Their shapes evoke cellular structures, organic growth or cosmic expanses without ever settling into representation. The glossy, at times reflective surfaces draw light, space and the viewer into the painting; each encounter thus becomes new, while the work itself can never be fully retained in memory. Within this ‘push and pull’ of proximity and distance, planning and chance, Jansen develops a form of painting that treats beauty not as a harmonious endpoint, but as a point of departure for disquiet and ambivalence.

Jürgen Jansen, born in Rheydt in 1960, initially studied biology, art and design education at Gesamthochschule Essen. He subsequently studied fine art with Per Kirkeby in Karlsruhe and Jan Dibbets in Düsseldorf, becoming Dibbets’s master student in 1992. Jürgen Jansen lives and works in Düsseldorf.