Johannes Kahrs

Johannes Kahrs was born in Bremen, Germany, in 1965. He lives and works in Berlin. Perception’s analysis and images’ manipulation are at the core of Johannes Kahrs’ reflection. The subjects of the German author’s artworks present themselves in all their human indecipherability, shaken by pressures and malaise: the monstrous yet familiar realis of Kahrs’ paintings provokes entangled empathy and reveals the hidden and violent side of humanity.Starting from images collected from magazines, the internet, newspapers, advertisements, amateur and feature films, but also from photographs taken by himself, Johannes Kahrs releases the image from its original context, depicting fragmented and isolated scenes and escaping a coherent narrative. By cutting the image, enlarging its details and disconnecting it from its original embedded context, the artist emphasizes the symbolic meaning of the scene to reveal its deeper and mysterious contents.With his work, Johannes Kahrs challenges our beliefs and our ability to observe what surrounds us. Through his pictorial practice, the artist fights the hectic and superficial representation of human body in times of mass communication and outof-control sharing. Johannes Kahrs questions reality by revealing its physicality, perturbation and its violent sensuality. Work by the artist is held in major museum collections such as: Centre Pompidou, Paris; MOCA, Los Angeles; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Museu Serralves, Porto; SFMoMA, San Francisco; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; MoMA, New York and S.M.A.K., Ghent.