Janis Löhrer
Janis Löhrer
BEST BOOTH AWARD | Ceramic Brussels 2026
Galerie Judith Andreae received the best booth award at Ceramic Brussels 2026 for its solo-presentation of works by artist Janis Löhrer (*1991).
In his artistic practice, Janis Löhrer explores topics of queer identity, masculinity, sexuality, body, and space. The centerpiece of his solo presentation with Galerie Judith Andreae (Booth A11) at Ceramic Brussels 2026 is a large-scale ceramic wall installation: a meticulously recreated communal shower featuring handmade shower fittings and soap dishes.
Ceramic Brussels: January 21–25, 2026
Tour&Taxis, Picardstraat 3, 1000 Brussels
JANIS LÖHRER | Ceramic Brussels
opening January 21, 2026: In his artistic practice, Janis Löhrer explores topics of queer identity, masculinity, sexuality, body, and space. The centerpiece of his solo presentation with Galerie Judith Andreae (Booth A11) at Ceramic Brussels 2026 is a large-scale ceramic wall installation: a meticulously recreated communal shower featuring handmade shower fittings and soap dishes.
The installation continues and expands the approach Löhrer developed for his first institutional solo exhibition, Right Place Wrong Time, at NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein in Aachen in November 2025, where he first presented a series of works evoking a public bathroom— undoubtedly another charged setting for secret encounters and fleeting glances. Urinals were thoroughly recreated in handmade ceramics, complemented by a wall ashtray and pink urinal blocks, reflecting his ongoing exploration of intimate, socially coded spaces which tend to be perceived differently by heteronormatively trained eyes. For Brussels, he revisits these spatial investigations, linking the ceramic shower to his earlier work while pushing the concept further.
Alongside the ceramic installation, Löhrer draws on his extensive body of watercolor paintings, which he presents for the first time as a large-scale wallpaper, creating a dialogue with his ceramic sculptural works. With painting as his initial practice, the artist consistently integrates painterly gestures into his ceramics, using glazing and compositional strategies to carry the same chromatic and formal sensibilities. While his paintings distill scenes from queer culture into a direct, graphic form, his ceramics address them through abstraction and anonymity, allowing the narratives to materialize in the absence of identifiable bodies.
Löhrer evokes liminal settings that probe the boundaries of intimacy, publicness, and desire, revealing traces of vulnerability, shame, and community. Communal showers and bathrooms become non-hierarchical spaces, charged utopias in contrast to the pragmatic, often uneasy reality of public environments, while smaller objects, from men’s undergarments to private everyday items such as an anti-hair loss tonic, extend these tensions into even more intimate registers. By addressing queer sexuality and cruising through absence and suggestion, his works create spaces of longing deliberately stripped of romantic softness, where discomfort is embraced as an intrinsic element of desire.
Ceramic Brussels: January 21–25, 2026
Tour&Taxis, Picardstraat 3, 1000 Brussels
JANIS LÖHRER | Neuer Aachener Kunstverein
Right Place, Wrong Time, opening 1 November: Janis Löhrer's artistic practice deals with questions of queer identity, space and body, masculinity and shame. In his first institutional solo exhibition, Right Place, Wrong Time, which opens on 1 November 2025 at the NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein as part of the Junge Kunst Euregio series in cooperation with STAWAG, Löhrer presents a site-specific installation consisting of a multitude of glazed ceramics that appear to be scattered randomly throughout the space, as well as a large communal ceramic shower, which the artist has recreated in detail, complete with a tiled wall, handmade shower fittings and soap dishes. The exhibition space becomes a transient place that traces the character of public toilets, bathhouses or parks, without, however, placing the expected protagonists of these social spaces, who are read as male, at the centre of the presentation. These interstitial spaces represent intimacy and publicness in equal measure, simultaneously expressing an interplay of social norms and secret practices. In these spaces, Löhrer explores ideas of vulnerability, the boundaries of shame, desire and community.
Galerie Judith Andreae presents Janis Löhrer in a solo presentation at Ceramic Brussels, from 21 to 25 January 2026.
