Press Release

Joas Nebe, Solo Show
Nudes
Mumbai, India | July 3 – July 31, 2025
 

Vedica Art Studios and Gallery is pleased to announce Nudes, a solo exhibition by the esteemed German multidisciplinary artist Joas Nebe, on view from July 3 to July 31, 2025, in Mumbai, India. Featuring more than fifteen works executed in marker and color ink on found book pages, this exhibition constitutes a profound investigation into the human body as a site of both artistic expression and intellectual dissection. In this series, Nebe explores the intersections of gesture and structure, abstraction and documentation, inviting viewers into a space of critical reflection on how bodies are interpreted, rendered, and ultimately understood.
 

Each work in the series juxtaposes gestural nude figures with the rigid frameworks of printed anatomical texts. In pieces such as Sitting Nude and Standing Nude, the artist applies assertive black linework and transparent washes of ochre and green over repurposed pages sourced from medical literature. The anatomical diagrams, once intended for clinical instruction, are visually disrupted and recontextualized, becoming a substrate for layered visual and conceptual inquiry. The nude figure in Nebe's hands is neither idealized nor eroticized—it becomes a cipher, a communicative form negotiating between visibility and fragmentation, subjectivity and categorization.
 

By choosing book pages as the ground for these compositions, Nebe underscores the tension between embodied experience and the epistemologies that attempt to contain it. The printed texts and diagrams—historically associated with objectivity, science, and classification—are overwritten with expressive marks that resist simplification. This deliberate act of re-inscription questions the authority of anatomical imagery and posits the body not as a specimen to be analyzed, but as a locus of meaning shaped by context, perception, and cultural memory.
 

Nebe's longstanding interest in communication theory, particularly the sender-receiver model, finds potent resonance in this body of work. Here, the nude becomes a form of encoded transmission—at once biological and symbolic, visual and textual. Each page is transformed into a reflective interface, prompting viewers to engage with the act of seeing as both interpretive and constructed. The viewer is thus implicated in the process of translation, navigating between visual immediacy and intellectual framing, between the known and the unknowable.
 

Born in 1968 in Hamburg and currently based in Staufen, Germany, Joas Nebe brings to this series a unique synthesis of psychological insight and artistic innovation. With a diploma in Psychology and Media Science from the University of Hamburg, and formal training in techniques such as egg tempera, gouache, and printmaking, Nebe's practice is marked by both conceptual rigor and material sensitivity. His works have been exhibited widely across Europe, Asia, and the United States, with highlights including presentations at Zendai MOMA in Shanghai, the Museum Tarii Crisurilor in Romania, and K-Gold Temporary Gallery in Greece. His art is included in numerous private collections, notably the van den Ende collection in Amsterdam, and has been recognized with awards including the Michelangelo Prize and the International Prize Leonardo da Vinci.
 

Nudes offers a compelling and nuanced contribution to contemporary discourse on figuration, perception, and the politics of representation. In reframing the nude not as a static genre but as a critical and fluid site of engagement, Joas Nebe challenges viewers to reconsider how we look at bodies—and how those bodies, in turn, reflect the systems that define them. With sensitivity, precision, and conceptual clarity, this exhibition situates the act of drawing within broader philosophical and cultural dialogues, and in doing so, affirms the enduring relevance of the body as a subject of artistic inquiry.