Modern Art is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new work by Lothar Hempel. This is his fifth solo exhibition with Modern Art. Lothar Hempel’s work lifts disparate images from a wide range of sources and arranges them together to generate disjointed pictorial narratives and surreal compositions. Theatricality, both archaic and contemporary forms, persists across the various mediums Hempel employs. 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. Occupying the second floor of Modern Art’s Vyner Street gallery, Hempel’s new works range from large scale, wall-based collage works to paintings, sculptures and freestanding mounted images, and include depictions of, among other things, the 1971 Philippe Garrel movie La Cicatrice Intérieure, a Kham woman wearing a traditional Tibetan outfit typically worn to a horse race, and the famous Parisian Metro signage created by Hector Guimard in 1900.

Lothar Hempel was born in Cologne in 1966. He lives and works in Berlin. Hempel studied at Kunstakademie Dusseldorf from 1987 to 1992. Hempel’s work has been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at Casanova, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2008); Concentrations 42, Dallas Museum, Dallas (2002), and Propaganda, Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2002). His work has been included in the recent exhibitions Back to Mulholland Drive, La Panacée, Centre for Contemporary Culture, Montpellier (2017); Inside the distance, Galerie Sabine Knust, Munich (2017); Zeitgeist, Musée d’art moderne et contemporain (MAMCO), Geneva (2017); 12th Biennale de Lyon, France (2015); Threads: A Phantasmagoria about Distance, Kaunas Biennial, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud, Kaunas (2015); Experience Pommery #11,FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims (2013); Heaven, Athens Biennale (2009), Le Song D’un Poete, Frac des Pays de la Loire, Nantes (2009); Beaufort 03, Triennial for Contemporary Art, Blankenberge (2009); 7th Gwangju Biennial (2008); Pale Carnage, Arnolfini, Bristol and DCA, Dundee (2007); Imagination becomes Reality. Werke aus der Sammlung Goetz,ZKM – Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe (2007). Lothar Hempel has exhibited regularly and continuously for almost two decades, during which time his work has been seen in exhibitions at many esteemed institutions, among them: the Venice Biennale; Tate Liverpool, ICA, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; P.S.1, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Portikus, Frankfurt am Main; Secession, Vienna; Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris. For more information please contact Alexander Glover (alexander@modernart.net