Johann Alexis von Haehling is a Franco-German multidisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture, installation, video, and socially engaged projects. His practice centers on the question of how human beings can adapt and transform within shifting cultural, ecological, and technological contexts. He approaches art as a vehicle to investigate ways toward more life-serving paths, behaviors, and solutions.

His abstract paintings are marked by reduced surfaces and meditative spaces, offering a visual grammar for engaging with these themes. Resonating with the geometric abstraction of Frank Stella, the text-based strategies of Jenny Holzer, and the chromatic explorations between Agnes Martin and Helen Frankenthaler, his work synthesizes reduction and simplicity as a counterpoint to the complexity of contemporary life. Alongside these paintings, Alexis’ sculptures translate notions of emptiness, reflection, and material tension into three-dimensional form, extending his exploration of how art can create contemplative spaces.

Beyond the studio, Alexis extends his practice into social and conceptual formats. As founder of the Arts & Nature Social Club (2017–2023), he developed a Beuys-inspired social sculpture that brought together scientists, entrepreneurs, and artists in salon-style gatherings across Germany, California, and Europe. These encounters functioned as integral artworks – temporary communities that embodied art’s transformative capacity within society. The forthcoming podcast project Tomorrow Thinking, developed within the BBUG fellowship, continues this trajectory. Conceived as an artistic project, it takes Truth is Capital – a painting by Johann Alexis – as its conceptual starting point and investigates the effects of the social market economy. In dialogue with leaders from politics, business, science, and culture, the podcast examines how economic structures shape society – and how artistic inquiry can open new perspectives on adaptation, transformation, and the search for a more life-serving future.

In 2026, a documentary film by Stefan Armbruster will focus on Johann Alexis in dialogue with Çagla Ilk, curator of the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2024, in the context of his recent exhibition at la maison, Baden-Baden.

In addition, he is a university lecturer in entrepreneurship, where he brings artistic thinking into conversation with entrepreneurial thinking, treating education itself as a creative field of experimentation.

Johann Alexis lives and works between a historic farmhouse in Alsace, France, and Berlin, Germany.