The artist employs newspapers, magazines, films, advertisements, and his own photographic archive as subject matter for his paintings and drawings, and then reinterprets the source material by removing and altering signifying details contained in the image. Kahrs blurs, crops, and repositions the composition to reveal a unique but ambiguous rendering of the subject.
Johannes Kahrs was born in 1965 in Bremen, Germany, and currently lives and works in Berlin. His work is in the collections of numerous museums and institutions worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Centre Pompidou, Paris, The Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Exhibitions of his work include solo shows at GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy, Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London, and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin as well as the group exhibition Painting of Modern Life curated by Ralph Rugoff for the Hayward Gallery in London.
Shown: "Untitled (man sitting)," 2011, Oil on canvas, 38 1/4 x 45 3/8 inches.
New York City, NY; NYC