Sebastian Hosu

“Painting is my language,” explains Sebastian Hosu. In his studio on the site of the former cotton mill in Leipzig-Plagwitz, the artist, who was born in Satu Mare, Transylvania in 1988, produces predominantly large-format canvases using oil paint. Hosu ​​works with the wet-on-wet technique. To do this, technical expertise, decisiveness and intuition must come together at the right moment. Several layers of paint are quickly pushed over or next to each other before they dry. “I paint like in butter,” explains the artist. “I model and paint.” In the process, Hosu condenses his canvases and at the same time allows them to breathe. With brush and squeegee he breathes a soul into them. That's what makes his art magical.

The painted space and the relationships between form and color are at the center of Hosu's artistic interests. But there is nothing cerebral, nothing artificially theoretical about his painting. On the contrary. Inklings of human bodies become more concrete or more abstract. They materialize or dissolve. It's about different degrees of presence. Hosu ​​thinks in colors, movements and surfaces. He takes color and its materiality very seriously. In this way you can speak to paintings as if you were speaking in different languages. These images vibrate. The colors are sprayed, applied with a brush or squeegee. The artist is not afraid to jump. And he has mastered the art of precision landing. In this way, Hosu finds images for situations that you wouldn't otherwise get a picture of.

Hosu ​​struggles with his medium. He brings the suppleness of a martial artist and the repartee of a jazz or improvisation musician to the studio. “If I don’t feel joy or resistance, I can’t start a picture.” The art historian Anka Ziefer recently described Hosu’s compositions as exploring those moments when “humans and nature connect in the color space without becoming an abstract mixture.” According to Ziefer, the painter works in the “border area of ​​what can be depicted”. This border area, as we learn through Hosu's pictures, is not an inhospitable place. It is a visual zone in which constant movement and change reign. Hosu ​​focuses on the question of the relationship between figure and space. This is a nifty move. Because this relationship status can never be conclusively clarified. It remains complicated. In life as in art, this relationship is constantly being renegotiated.

—Kito Nedo

Sebastian Hosu (b. 1988 in Satu Mare, RO) grew up in Romania and studied Fine Arts in Cluj-Napoca at the University of Fine Arts and Design as well as the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin, Italy (2008–2010). Following a Masters-degree in painting at the Académie Royale des Beaux-arts in Liège, BE, he did a Masterstudentdegree (Meisterschüler) at Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig (class of Heribert C. Ottersbach). Hosus works have already found lots recognition in Germany and abroad through solo- shows at the Museum der bildenden Künste in Leipzig 2018,the Kunstverein Freunde aktueller Kunst in Zwickau 2019 and group-shows in the G2 Kunsthalle in Leipzig (2023). With paintings and drawings he is already beeing represented in renowed privat and public collections. His works are being presented and collected internationally. Latley his works have been shown in solo-shows at Double Q Gallery, Hong Kong, at Anca Poterasu Gallery, Bucharest, Romania and Philipp Andres Gallery, Leipzig.