Lothar Hempel

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 California New Wave culture, Greek tragedy, pagan culture, music, and film. What interests Hempel are not the references themselves, but the way he can reappropriate them to create his own universe. His works are densely emotional and rather than being presented as a concept from the outset, they force us to confront lost or forgotten memories that we feel we could retrieve at any moment, thus generating multiple individual interpretive 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 different media clash in an almost violent manner. Through her 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. She has exhibited her 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. Her work has received critical acclaim and has been recognized with several awards, including the Daniel Frese Prize in 2004 and the Premio Nacional de Artes Visuales in 2012.