The performance artist Johan Lorbeer has died. According to the German art magazine KUNSTFORUM International, the internationally known artist and performer passed away in Berlin on 8 October 2026 at the age of 76. Berlin had been his long-time home, and he taught as a professor at the city's University of the Arts.

Lorbeer built his reputation on two signature formats: his Still-Life performances and his Super-Slow performances. In them he developed what KUNSTFORUM describes as a distinctive and original way of presenting the human body and human existence in relation to space, time and society. His work was characterised as simultaneously profound, entertaining and communicative, qualities that made his appearances memorable well beyond the performance-art circuit.

By holding poses with extreme slowness or freezing his body in compositions modelled on the still life, Lorbeer blurred the boundary between living figure and image. The format turned spectators into witnesses of a body negotiating gravity, endurance and time, and it gave his work a philosophical undertow that set it apart from more theatrical strands of performance art.

His death removes one of the quieter but most original voices of European performance art. Tributes have begun to note how his practice anticipated today's wider fascination with slowness and bodily presence as artistic material, themes that younger generations of performers continue to explore. Lorbeer, who was 76, had lived in Berlin for many years, where he also held his professorship at the University of the Arts. His death was reported by KUNSTFORUM on 15 October 2026, a week after he passed away.