On the 19th May from 7pm GALERIE JAHN UND JAHN will open their new spaces at Baaderstraße 56 B and C with two solo exhibitions, Imi Knoebel – Zeichnungen and Ioan Grosu – Galopp. Although both galleries, Galerie Fred Jahn with its well-established rooms at Maximillianstraße 10, and Galerie Jahn Baaderstraße run by Matthias Jahn, have always been separate from each other, in the future they will organise five to six solo exhibitions together, which will take place at the same time and within the same context.

Fred Jahn founded his own gallery on Maximillianstraße in Munich in 1978. His program included contributions from German and American artists who were at the beginning of their careers at that time, such as Georg Baselitz, Per Kirkeby or Fred Sandback. Paintings and drawings on paper formed the focal point of his work although detours into the areas of sculpture, jewellery or ceramics were also welcome occurrences.

His son Matthias Jahn founded a gallery in 2008 and primarily showed young artists related to Günther Förg. Matthias Jahn inherited the preference for painting and most of all for works on paper from his father; he continued this tradition for the next generation. With a flair for new approaches and with sound aesthetic judgement, he gathered together artists into a new program that continually featured connections or responses to the achievements of the previous generation shown by Fred Jahn.

When a joint appearance of the galleries came about at Art Cologne in 2011, a conceptual and organisational foundation was laid for potential affiliation in the future. Gradually, the possible contours of a combined Gallery Jahn and Jahn were sketched, and their team expanded to include Tim Geissler who contributed to the contemporary program.

As well as maintaining a sense of continuity between the traditional and the new, and further pursuing the focus on painting and works on paper, surprising highlights are planned. Dialogue with the artists will remain, as in the past, a central source of inspiration for gallery work.

Ioan Grosu (born 1985 in Medias, Romania) will show new images and works on paper which have been produced over the last few years. Since 2005 he has lived on and off in Munich, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. He belongs to the first generation of the digital era but his paintings, done mostly in oil and emerging though various stages, come into being through predominantly analogue sources and techniques: a transfer between media, motifs and different styles that overlap in time and space, between dreams and consciousness, the profane and the sublime, abstraction and figuration, reality and fiction. A comprehensive catalogue on the work of Ioan Grosu with a text by Belinda Grace Gardner will accompany the exhibition.