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