Jan Voss was born in 1936 in Hamburg, Germany. From 1956 to 1960 he studied at the ‘Hochschule für Bildende Künste’ in Munich. In 1966/67 Voss is a guest teacher at the ‘Hochschule für Bildende Künste’ in Hamburg. From 1987 to 1992 he held a professorship at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 1997 works by Voss were shown in the Kunsthalle Kiel, and in 2002 in the Städtische Galerie Villa Zanders in Bergisch Gladbach. In the same year, his acclaimed one-man show took place in Art Cologne.
The general theme in Jan Voss’s art is the “ordered”, but at the same time the constantly moving chaos creates a multifaceted situation. His oeuvre is characterized by experimenting with different techniques and materials. His paintings show powerful, colourful scenes as well as calm and rather graphic works on canvas. In contrast, his paper reliefs are composed of torn pieces of watercolour-painted fragments. Or his collage works in which he combines all kinds of materials into a whole of artistic chaos. Whatever materials he uses, they all have the same individuality in common. Each time they are an accumulation of different colour and shape elements that interlock, overlap and are connected by lines, symbols and symbol fragments. Initially he applied this formal language to the two-dimensional image, and from the 1980s he did this also to the three-dimensional object. As a result, he expanded his experimental possibilities and used various techniques such as folding, creasing, tearing, sawing, nailing and gluing. It is precisely those constant changes and experiments that make the artist unmistakable in his style. Since 1960 Jan Voss has lived and worked in Paris, where he is regarded as one of the most prominent contemporary artists. His work is also spread across numerous museums worldwide.