Melancholy Self Portrait

Horst Janssen was a German printmaker and draughtsman whose obsessively detailed pen and ink works mapped the interior life of the postwar psyche through distorted self-portraiture and narrative sequences. Working across etching, lithography, and drawing from the 1950s onward, he developed a visual language of psychological intensity that rejected both abstraction and socialist realism. His prints and drawings, characterized by intricate hatching, fragmentary bodies, and hallucinatory spaces, established him as a central figure in Northern European printmaking of the postwar period.

Hamburg, Germany