Jan Siebert (b. Germany) is a painter whose practice has taken shape over thirty years of sustained engagement with Latin America. In the mid-1990s he left Europe without a fixed plan, moving first through Mexico before settling in Brazil —...
Read MoreJan Siebert (b. Germany) is a painter whose practice has taken shape over thirty years of sustained engagement with Latin America. In the mid-1990s he left Europe without a fixed plan, moving first through Mexico before settling in Brazil — a trajectory driven less by destination than by a desire to understand places from the inside out.
He works on location, often at night, carrying only the essentials: canvas, paint, a small flashlight. The settings are unglamorous and sometimes risky — side streets, favelas, the peripheral neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro and Salvador da Bahia where daily life unfolds largely outside the frame of institutional culture. Painting directly in these environments, Siebert builds a body of work marked by chromatic intensity and atmospheric weight, images that carry the specific gravity of having been made on the spot.
Over the years his practice has developed a pronounced social dimension. The communities and urban spaces he paints have long occupied the margins of the Western art world, and his sustained presence among them — spanning decades rather than visits — lends the work a quality of earned attention. Each canvas reflects a relationship with its subject, accumulated slowly and without shortcuts.
Siebert has exhibited across Brazil, Mexico, and Germany, with presentations at the MAC Museum of Contemporary Art and the MUBE Brazilian Museum of Sculpture and Ecology in São Paulo; the Centro Cultural dos Correios and Centro Cultural Light in Rio de Janeiro; the Goethe-Institut Hamburg; the Embassy of Mexico in Berlin; Fabrik der Künste in Hamburg; and Messe Basel in 2025. He lives and works in Brazil.
