Sebastian Maas Germany, b. 1984

Sebastian Maas was born in 1984 in Aachen, Germany, and lives and works in Berlin. Before committing to painting, he pursued an unusually rigorous academic formation in the natural sciences: a Bachelor's degree in Biology from 2004 to 2007, followed by a Master's degree in Neuroscience from 2007 to 2010, both at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. In 2013 he enrolled at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich to study painting and graphic art in the class of Professor Karin Kneffel, completing his Meisterschüler degree in 2020. This dual background in scientific inquiry and painterly tradition is central to understanding his practice: Maas approaches the image with the same analytical rigour he once applied to biological systems, dissecting the grammar of art history in order to reassemble it on his own terms.

Maas works in a collage-like mode, extracting motifs, ornaments, and formal elements from canonical works spanning different epochs and styles, then recombining them into new pictorial compositions that construct an original logic of meaning and visual experience. He frequently works on loose truck tarpaulins rather than traditional canvas, and uses his own mixed pigments, giving his surfaces a material distinctiveness that sets them apart from conventional painting. His works invite the viewer to locate familiar references within unfamiliar configurations, to question learned symbols and interpretive habits, and to engage in what he describes as an aesthetically charged act of self-assurance. The tension between inner and outer worlds, between the known and the newly perceived, runs through his practice as a sustained preoccupation.

Maas has been shown at significant institutional venues including the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the Kunsthalle München, the Kunstverein Marburg, the Kunstverein St. Sebastianskapelle Ulm, the Kunstverein Altes Gefängnis Freising, and the Kunstverein Würzburg, where he presented the solo exhibition ACCIDIT in 2024. In 2021 he was selected for the inaugural residency of the KISS BANG ART programme in Hamburg. His work is held in private collections including the Nassib and Sarah Abou-Khalil Collection in Dubai and the Xavier Castro ProArte Foundation in Guayas, Ecuador.

KORNFELD Galerie Berlin has presented Sebastian Maas in the duo exhibition Distant Belongings with Agnes Lammert at 68projects by KORNFELD in 2023, in the solo exhibition Seduce Me at KORNFELD Galerie in 2026, and at Untitled Art, Miami Beach in 2022. His practice continues to evolve through an ongoing interrogation of art history and visual culture, sustained by a commitment to painting as a form of critical and sensory inquiry.