Biography

Lothar Hempel was born in 1966 in Cologne. He lives and works in Berlin.

He draws his inspiration from German history as well as from Californian New-Wave, Greek tragedy, pagan culture, music and cinema. His interest doesn’t reside in references as such: taking images for what they are or for what they convey in contemporary western culture is not his main concern. Rather, he seeks a re-appropriation akin to a way of seizing reality to make it circulate in his universe. His works are densely emotional, and instead of relinquishing themselves from the start in the form of a concept, they make us face lost or forgotten memories which we feel we could recover from one second to the other, thus engendering a multiplicity of individual interpretative possibilities and creating paths between dream and reality. Lothar Hempel creates a cosmogony – complete with characters, objects and environment – in which verbal and visual intermingle and by which previously distinct media clash in an almost violent way.

His work is in multiple public collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Art/US; Museum of Modern Art, New York/US and in several FRAC, Fonds Régionaux d’Art Contemporain/FR.

Recent solo shows include: WINDOW, Anton Kern Gallery, New york (2020); Le Terrain Vague, Stuart Shave / Modern Art, London (2018); Oral Heart, Anton kern gallery, New York (2017); Sex and the City, Art : Concept, Paris (2016); Working Girl, Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf (2016); Tropenkoller, Modern Art, London (2015).

At the gallery

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