Silence and understatement permeate Johannes Herrmann's paintings, which corresponds to the approach that the artist describes as follows:

A plan allows me to be casual. The plan should be executed consistently and casually in order to capture the contrast between plan and execution in the painting. I pay just enough attention to pictorial standards such as content, composition and color so that they are not conspicuous by their absence, or so little that their sophistication is not the point.

Herrmann's works are not meant to assert much or little, but hardly anything.

Not as a gesture of refusal, as with the early Krebber or the endless apologists of Bartleby's “I would prefer not to”, but as a practice that flees everything that is more than “present”.

Only when it is flat can it be deep. Such images are always a manifestation of two impossibilities: On the one hand, a superordinate principle, on the other, a very personal formulation. For each exists only because of the other and each means the obliteration of the other.

Johannes Herrmann, born in Kiel in 1982, studied fine art at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München, class Günther Förg / Matthias Dornfeld, at the HFBK Hamburg with Anselm Reyle and at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Thomas Scheibitz.

Since their time together at the HFBK Hamburg, Johannes Herrmann has enjoyed a long-standing friendship with the now internationally successful Chinese artist Xiyao Wang and with the Swiss artist liaison and curator Tizian Baldinger, who is dedicated to the mediation and promotion of both positions.