Lothar Hempel

If all the world is a stage, sometimes life can feel like a stage you’re going through. Hempel’s theatricality, predicated on the belief that an audience will actually work as hard as he wants them to, is earnest, unsceptical and more than a little idealistic. He treats the world like a giant ready-made on the move, encouraging art – as an object, an idea or a style – to dematerialise into different realms. It’s an approach which reflects a greater disintegration – that of knowing what art should do or be anymore, apart the one thing it’s always been – a medium for change and an often conflicting fusion of ideas and images. Alluding to the stage, but exploiting the absence of performers, he asks nothing less than that the viewer become at once actor (an improvisational one at that) and spectator, taking an active role in the interpretation and creation of meaning – a meaning which emerges in his work in a way comparable to the way it emerges in life: as flashes of intuition, moments of clarity and usually inconclusively; through the fragments, connections, signs and sounds of our environments.

Jennifer Higgie, Let’s get lost (excerpt) in Frieze September-October 1999, p 86-89