Lothar Hempel

Lothar Hempel was born in 1966 in Cologne where he lives and works. 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.