08/05 – 26/06/2004
Opening on
Lothar Hempel
is born in 1966 in
Selected Solo Exhibitions:
2004 On
the
Art: Concept,
The Snow Show, Tate
2003 The
song of the bird is NONSENSE, Anton Kern gallery,
2002 Magnani gallery,
Propaganda,
2001 Magnet,
Art: Concept,
Selected Group Exhibitions:
2004 She’s
come undone, Artemis Greenberg Van Doren Gallery,
New York (cur. Augusto Arbizo/
June – July)
The Snow Show, Kemin and
2002 Les vertus sont des
titres, les souffrances sont des droits, Collection FRAC Poitou-Charentes, Angouleme, France
2001 A
New Horizon, Art: Concept,
2000 Age
of Influence,
1999 Oldnewtown, Casey Kaplan,
Ars Viva, Portikus, Frankfurt/Main
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 ans sounds of our environments.
Jennifer Higgie, Let’s get
lost in Frieze September-October 1999, p 86-89
Lothar Hempel’s installations can be viewed as one connected
composition, a parallel universe. Sculptures and paintings create a scenario,
an atmospheric whole. The artist builds the backdrop for a scene from a
potential, fictive situation.
Like sets, the works become a
temporary platform, split the space into an unspecific time, a serie of interrelated images: time and space are loosing
their homogenic and linear character.
Pale mute figures, urban characters
then emerge; ellusive narratives and stories of
isolated people, like in transit between a front and a back, beauty and
disaster.
On the Olympus focuses on the idea of Drama; it’s the first
solo exhibition of Lothar Hempel
in Athens.
Kriezi 1
10553 Athens Greece
T&F 00 30 210 33 14 375
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