Robert Janz was born in Belfast but grew up largely in the Americas. His first sculptures were made, and exhibited while living in southern Spain. The Redrawing series began during lengthy visits to Los Angeles. Since 1968 he has been based in London, but for the last year has been living and working in Berlin on a DAAD grant.

extract from a letter to Robin Klassnik, Berlin 8.81: My involvement with art was initiated by a Korean therapist while I was in a US military prison hospital.  He introduced me to ideas from the Orient which became crucial to my emotional survival and eventual  rehabilitation. .....There is nothing in the West as simple and clear as a Seshu landscape scroll. The drawing begins in the winter mountains, traverses rivers and plains in summer and fall, and brings you, 10 meters of drawing later, back to the mountains and the end of the year. In one fluid drawing all of Nature waxes and wanes. This work is typical: thousands of years age the Chinese invented the first and best movies.

In Matt's Gallery on the afternoon of 11th October Janz will draw the sequence PLUS MINUS (Redrawing 12), erasing and replacing at regular intervals of time. The whole drawing will evolve from beginning to end over a 5 hour span. The same drawing was performed in Berlin, erased and replaced daily, the sequence spanning 11 days.

extract from Unclenching, Steiner Galerie, Berlin 3.81: A Redrawing is transient in any particular instance, but like a song, it has permanent form..... Each complete -Redrawing should evolve through a full cycle of changes. For this work erasure is a positive, creative act, as it is for all living things.

extract from a letter to Eva Maria Schon Berlin 11.30: Think of Redrawing as tunes for simple visual songs, which can be extended, elaborated upon, interpreted in different ways by different performers..... I call them Redrawings, they are intended to be drawn again and again. They are time drawings, their total evolving through the time dimension.

extract from Clear Water on Rock, A.R.E., Belfast 8.30 :  Redrawings are travelling forms, transient but renewable. Anyone can have a direct experience of the drawings through the reenactment of the work.

extract from Les Lignes Changeantes, Vehicule, Montreal 5.78: Le nomadisme est exprime a travers un art de la transformation de l'effacement et du renouvellement.

extract from Curves for Changing Spaces, Hester Van Royen Gallery ,London 3.76: This work originates in a love for the nomadic, the flexible and adaptive, the shape- changing; form that changes form..... There is an integrity and clarity about works whose self-erasure is part of their structure.

extract from Robert Janz's first catalogue: Continuum, Cordoba, Spain 5.66:

Continuum: a continuous series of parts passing into one another......