Welcome to this website

Jannis Besen
Artist: sculptor
Currently studying at  Academy of Fine Arts, Munich and Academy of Fine Arts, Düsseldorf. 
besen@protonmail.com
instagram: @musszumbus

CV:
In 2016/17, I gained extensive theater experience and worked as an assistant director at Schauspielhaus Zurich, Gare Du Nord in Basel, and Volksoper Vienna in productions by René Pollesch, Milo Rau and Theater HORA. In 2021, I completed a curatorial internship at KW Berlin.
Since 2018, I have been studying Fine Arts at HFBK Hamburg with Prof. M. Boyce. In the summer of 2021, I spent an exchange semester at Beaux-Arts in Paris with B. Sarcevic. Subsequently, I joined Prof. A. Bircken's class in Munich as a guest student and then permanently transferred to ADBK Munich.
Prior to this, I studied Theater Studies at the University of Vienna and completed various internships, which are not detailed here as they are less relevant. :)

Brief selection of works:


Pressure to grow, 2025, height: 44cm
Bronze, colombian emerald.
Short notice of concept about this work: growth and progress are inherent to “mankind”. challenges cannot be avoided. this sculpture negotiates the tension between play and vision. between wildness and control. -there is one circumstance that I find very interesting: some people keep cats to ward off snakes as cats have a better reaction time than snakes. this work contains symbolism, but should leave a lot of room for interpretation.
Pressure to grow (detail of the eyes)
Studio shot 

Clown school, 2024 180x80cm
Two oil paintings and one oil painted found obect (canvas on the right side). The found object hit me right above my right eye from storage, falling from about 4 meters. It was a self-inflicted accident that happened end of last year. I never intednded to do such a personal work but there it is.
(Unin-)corporated Cat and me on the train with a piece of literature I studied for my crypto research project. This was right before I exhibited this sculpture together with Klasse Bircken at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf 02/2025. 

Chess paintings, 2024, 115x115 cm (each)
Chess paintings (detail)
Projections, 2025
Two cats as one sculpture, sitting on a wood board, in display on a chair. cats are a theme in my art that won't let go. they can hardly not be domesticated by humans. It is rather the other way round. or is it? this is just one of the fictions and projections they want us to believe.
Hypocrsiy, 2025
Hypocrisy, bias, double standards, cute/ ness, ❌☑️💘 sculpture made out of silicone foam,
wire, pin eyes starring into certain circumstances; digesting. The material is so tricky to control but it fits the idea of domestication and wildness pretty well. 



 



Outsider trading, 2025, 60x80cm. 
Following my interest for macro -and in this case micro (stock market) economics I made this work. It is a mixture of associations I had when running into this landscape painting of the mountain “Zugspitze” (found object). the cat stands for unpredictability, the motif on the right is from the book by Ryu Murakami “In the miso soup”, 1997. this book stands for a dark narrative whose “atmosphere” fits well into the current time, as i felt while painting.



Ready made autumn break, 2022
Groupshow Nokwoodang Culture and Arts Foundation, Heanam, South Korea
fyi: For this exhibition I did not bring any material at all but wanted to work with found objects only.

Sinking ceiling, 2022
Groupshow Nokwoodang Culture and Arts Foundation, Heanam, South Korea
found object, bricks
fyi: this was the second work I contributed for the show. it focuses more on a painting theme through weathering which i find particularly interesting in this object. 




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ShaMe, 2022, Drawing sewn into city map of Paris sewn into pillow. The work is about an image I could not let go out of my head and thats why I used a pillow for an object work to put this drawing in display. 


Untitled, 2022, doormat, hair mature, tape, wood board. 

This sleep is being slept elsewhere, 2022
Group exhibition at the pool, Düsseldorf, 08/2022. 


Elevated strategy: rise, retreat, grounded, 2023
Uncoated sheet metal, epoxy, oil on canvas, 45x166x200cm


Portrait of a disease, 2022, 60x90cm
ink, thread, acrylic on canvas
Love Exposure, 2022, 125x90cm.
Ink on wood


Times are real-estates, 2020. 
Wood, wire, candle spindles, 33x66x115cm. 
Group exhibition Hamburg.


Humble monument, 2019, public intervention on construction site, Hamburg. (One of my early works) 


Ending this site with the work Sleepwalkers, 2025, glas. the motif is vaguely based on the motif on a 100 franc bill. the banknote shows an illustration of Giacometti's “l'homme qui marche”. I asked myself before the work where these figures of Giacomettis would head if they lived in the present. To me, they kind of represent the “ascent from “yesterdays past””. I decided the figures would sleepwalk. 




If you have any question, feel free to reach out: besen@protonmail.com, ig: @musszumbus