Jan Brokof

Jan Brokof (1977) was born in former Eastern Germany. In his early work the social environment of his youth with its Plattenbau apartment buildings and the chimneys of the local oil refinery play a prominent role. He once made a completely three-dimensional reconstruction in woodcut of his boy’s room, including the sansevierias in the window sill and posters of Billy Idol, Baywatch and Madonna on the walls. Besides the woodcuts he made colorful drawings with a billboard like stylization in which human interaction and social structures are visualized. This stylization is also strongly present in the colorful collages that he starts making after that. In Berlin he met a the theatre group andcompany&Co. with which he went on tour in Brazil. Together with Flemish theater director and writer Joachim Robbrecht Jan Brokof started Hans Staden TV, an ongoing video project. In present day Sao Paolo they act out the story of the 16th Century adventurer Hans Staden and create an archetypical tourist/outsider persona as well, which creates surreal scenes caused by the clash of cultures and of past and present.