Lothar Hempel’s printed photomontages and cut-out tableaux exist within a realm of fantasy. Lifting disparate images from a wide range of sources and arranging them together, Hempel generates unique pictorial narratives and surreal compositions. Reminiscent of billboards and theatrical props or sceneries, they draw on Italian cinema, commercial fashion, and depictions of stages to construct worlds at once hallucinatory and contrived. Working between freestanding mounted digital prints, sculpture, drawing, painting, installation and collage, each work follows a logic of performativity, setting the stage for a character’s sense of action. At times, well-known iconic or mythical figures are recombined with unfamiliar settings and objects, at others, fragments of geographically diverse but strikingly specific actors garbed in theatrical costumes bring the focus back to Hempel’s interest in cultural artifice. One sculpture nods to museological convention with a cut-out photograph of a Roman marble bust balanced on a white plinth. Another resembling an artificial palm tree incorporates a cylindrical plastic trunk filled with beans, pasta, and ping pong balls that recalls cinema pick-n-mix or eco-conscious provision dispensers. As such, these assemblages constellate diverse cultures, chronologies, and references to create situations that have a dreamlike quality, often steeped in nostalgia or melancholia. Throughout all the mediums, histories and moods Hempel’s work takes up, there is always a return to his playful interrogation of the politics and poetics of display across time and place.

Lothar Hempel was born in Cologne in 1966 and lives and works in Berlin. Solo exhibitions include Mehdi Chouakri, Berlin (2021); Modern Art, London (2018); Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, Philadelphia (2018); La Conservera, Ceuti (2012); The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2008); Magasin – Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble (2007); the Dallas Museum of Art (2002); and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2002). He has participated in recent group exhibitions at Galerie Perrotin, Paris (2020); Le Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris (2018); Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig (2017); La Panacée, Montpellier (2017); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017); and MAMCO, Geneva (2017). Hempel’s works are held in collections including the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; Frac des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou; MOCA, Los Angeles; and MoMA, New York.