Clean paws
Diploma show, Akademie der Bildenden Künste München, 2026. Cats cleaning their paws, a bank taken apart, two paintings on photo prints: surfaces that are almost polished, with the work still showing. The opening text by Malene Hagen is below.
Chess series
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Chess is a surface for calculation: every square defined, every move has its consequence. But anyone who has played knows the other side of it, the sinking in, the way the board takes over. You forget about time. The paintings keep that side.
Portraits
Die Leiden des jungen Posers began with a studio accident: a canvas I threw up the stairs came back like a boomerang and struck me above the eye (on the right, the hole at the top). I took a selfie, bleeding. Printed on canvas, it became my first self-portrait – I had never painted figuratively before.
Family affairs An abstract family portrait originally painted on a water damaged wall end of 2020 - now translated onto a water damaged rug. Studio 17000, Berlin, Duo show 04/2026.
Cold blood
In his novel Trust, Hernán Diaz describes capital as something antiseptic yet alive. It moves, sickens, can die, yet stays clean, tracing beautiful patterns as it drifts into ever more abstract spheres.
The Cold blood sculptures, in bronze and aluminium with diamond eyes, negotiate the forces that run through central banks and markets alike: growth, power, money, and the promise of cryptocurrency as a counter-answer to the 2008 financial crisis. Around them spiral the old, large emotions: greed, the abyss, dependence and independence.
Early work
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Studied at HFBK Hamburg with Martin Boyce from 2018, with an exchange at ENSBA Paris with Bojan Šarčević. From 2021 at ADBK Munich with Alexandra Bircken, in 2023 with Raphaela Vogel as interim professor; Meisterschüler in 2024. Guest student at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf 2024–2026, again with Alexandra Bircken. Diploma in fine arts, ADBK Munich, 2026.
Before art school: director's assistant at Schauspielhaus Zurich with René Pollesch, Milo Rau and Theater HORA; stage design assistant at Volksoper Vienna; curatorial internship at KW Berlin, 2020/21.
Artist statement
Jannis Besen’s work moves between calculation and chance, between contemplation and noise. His paintings, sculptures and interventions trace how systems settle into bodies, creatures and cities: a chess board, a person’s lock screen, cats. Technology stays in the background, shaping the surfaces without becoming their subject. The familiar is overwritten, not erased.
- Clean paws, essay by Malene Hagen (excerpt; complete text available upon request)
- Portfolio