Born in Graz, Austria, in 1967, he grew up in Vienna and in Siegendorf near the Austro-Hungarian border. In 1982, he immigrated to the USA with his family. From 1985 to 1989, he studied art, philosophy and arthistory at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.
He was a guest artist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1988. When Johannes Girardoni began as an abstract painter, he took his inspiration especially from the American painting of the 1950's and 60's, from the work of Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, among others.
About the time he was finishing his studies in 1988/89, he became increasingly interested in three-dimensionality. This interest caused him to expand his painting first out into the space and then always maintaining a reference to the wall - to switch to the creation of objects in which sculptural as well as painterly elements are equally present.
An encounter with the work of Jasper Johns proved to be of major significance for Girardoni's development. Wholly independent of their affinity to pop art, he felt such a strong emotional relationship to the qualities of the material and the objects of these works that he used them as the departure point for his own research into the material.
Through Johns, Girardoni also became acquainted with the rather rare technique of encaustics, the use of wax as a binding agent for the paint pigments.
In addition to objects which he has found by chance (mostly wood, sometimes also metal), colored or natural wax is his preferred medium. The combination, or confrontation, of these materials is part of the basic formal language of his art. It enables him to create a diverse orchestration of elementary formal oppositions and to work out an emotionally-charged canon of forms which sometimes seems archaic and simple.
Heavily influenced by C.G. Jung's depth psychology, especially the concept of "individuation", Girardoni is concerned with ridding himself step-by-step of inessentials in order to reach an entirety at ease with itself, in which both intellectual and emotional qualities appear in balance with each other.
He has been living in Manhattan, New York City, USA since 1989.
