Max Giermann Figuring Out

Max Giermann is known to a wide audience as an actor. For many years, his roles shaped television, stage, and film. Parallel to this public career, he developed an independent artistic practice: painting.

Max Giermann is known to a wide audience as an actor. For many years, his roles have shaped television, stage, and film. Alongside this public career, he has developed an independent artistic practice: painting. This practice is not a new experiment, but rather has accompanied Giermann since early childhood as a continuous form of expression. Since 2024, Max Giermann has been exhibiting his paintings publicly: Following a solo exhibition at the Kunstverein Ulm e.V., a solo exhibition at the Galerie Holger John in Dresden followed in 2025. Building on this, the exhibition “Figuring Out” (April 17 – June 13, 2026) brings his artistic work together for the first time at the janinebeangallery in Berlin and marks the next logical step in the presentation of his artistic output. Giermann’s painting emerges from a creative process that predates his fame as an actor and deliberately remains independent of clear attributions. While his name is familiar from another context, the paintings follow their own internal logic and assert themselves beyond biographical interpretations. Drawing and artistic creation were central forms of expression for Max Giermann (born 1975) from childhood and adolescence. Early on, he developed a pronounced interest in figures, bodies, and faces—less in the sense of representation than as a means of manifesting inner states. Even though painting now marks a new focus for him, the artistic creative process itself has always been familiar to him. Alongside other artistic forms of expression, painting has remained a constant, personal sphere of creation over the years. His long-standing independence from institutional expectations and market-related constraints has shaped the open, free character of his works. In the exhibited paintings, this attitude condenses into a style of painting that is not defined by recognizability or narrative clarity. The paintings depict figures, heads, and fragments of bodies without adhering to classical portraiture or simple psychological attributions. Crucial is the moment of placement, the emergence of a figure within the image, which takes shape in the process while simultaneously remaining open. The works are created directly and organically, with visible overpainting, breaks, and corrections. Lines are established and redrawn, areas of color overlap, and contours remain deliberately fluid. The acrylic paint is not merely applied smoothly but used physically: brushed, pulled, smeared, sometimes dripping. A recurring focus is on the face. Eyes appear oversized or asymmetrical, mouths slightly displaced, heads positioned frontally or at a minimal tilt within the pictorial space. The background functions less as a classical space than as a dynamic surface that connects the figure and the support. Characteristic of Giermann's painting is the balance between control and openness. Art historical references, from Expressionist positions to the gestural painting of the 20th century, are palpable, but are not quoted; rather, they are developed through a personal style. Or, as Giermann puts it: "Art history is like a prop room from which one can draw freely and playfully." The question of identity increasingly takes center stage in these works. Less as a fixed narrative, but rather as an open state: for Giermann, identity appears as something that takes shape, is questioned, and dissolves again in the painting process. The paintings do not assert unambiguous roles, masks, or closed figures. Rather, they are condensations of a state in which perception, projection, and painterly decision intertwine. Painting thus becomes a site of experience where image creation is not illustration, but an open process. The paintings and works on paper are not commentaries, but autonomous statements, and therefore independent, contradictory, and deliberately open to different interpretations.

What to expect:
Prints, Drawing, Painting