Lothar Hempel

Lothar Hempel - Untitled

Artist Biography: Lothar Hempel is a contemporary artist born in 1966 in Cologne, Germany, who currently lives and works in Berlin. Hempel finds inspiration in German history, as well as in California new wave culture, Greek tragedy, pagan culture, music and film.What interests Hempel is not the references themselves, but the way in which he can reappropriate them to create his own universe. His works are densely emotional and instead of presenting themselves as a concept from the outset, they force us to confront lost or forgotten memories that we feel we could recover from one moment to the next, thus generating multiple individual interpretative possibilities and creating paths between dream and reality.Lothar Hempel creates a cosmogony, complete with characters, objects and environment, in which the verbal and the visual intertwine and the different media confront each other in an almost violent way. Through his work, Hempel seeks to explore how we construct our perception of reality and how we can challenge and reinvent that perception through creativity and imagination.He has exhibited his work in numerous galleries and museums around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Kunstverein Hamburg in Germany, and Galerie Neu in Berlin. His work has been critically acclaimed and has been recognized with several awards, including the Daniel Frese Award in 2004 and the National Visual Arts Award in 2012.