Axel Geis was born in 1970 in Limburg, Germany, and currently lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe and the Akademie für Bildende Künste Mainz in Germany. Paintings by Axel Geis wed the face to the body, and yet highlight it. Body and face, and also the surroundings, become one. Geis’ figures may under these circumstances have literally lost their faces, but that they withdraw themselves so vehemently from the beholder becomes proof of their dignity and of Geis’ careful treatment of his subjects. Because Geis does not instrumentalize the people in his models shamelessly or voyeuristically—after all, they cannot resist his intervention in any way. On the contrary, he only discloses so much of them that in their abstraction the general human dimension behind the reproduced image is revealed. The rest is pure painting. And perhaps this constitutes the secret of his mysterious and unique paintings.