Jost Münster studied at Stuttgart Fine Art Academy and did his MFA at Goldsmiths University London.

Jost Münster works with painting and sculpture, three-dimensional space and two-dimensional surface, appearance and reality. He uses formats as diverse as postcard-sized sketches, large canvases, fragile room dividers, and sculptural constructions. At the core Münster remains concerned with painting and the limits of painting. In other words: Münster always starts with painting and he always returns to it in the end.

The motifs found in Münster’s most recent paintings almost exclusively refer to experiences gathered from his urban surroundings. The first step is one of recognition, isolating each motif from its original context. In a transitional stage come many small colour compositions through which individual forms are analysed, finding their way into painting. In a further stage the artist puts this vocabulary of forms into a new context with very different terms of reference: how does the form stand up to being painted? How does it relate to other forms in various formats? What happens when space intervenes in surface and room is opened up beyond the two-dimensional forms?

Through this experimental process Münster adds and subtracts painterly and constructed devices, observing how they heighten each other's potential. Painted elements crash against or slide over each other. What emerges is a depth of material reference which brings an immediacy of visual depth reminiscent of the original impact of finding the motifs: facades, windows, gates, piles of pallets or deserted industrial landscapes. But Münster does not intend to recreate the obvious reference to appearances by other means. Instead he uses the significance of what can be seen as a kind of relay between the real, the material and the painted space, between the individual elements and their composition, and last but not least between the evolving activity of painting and the painting’s finality as object.