LOTHAR HEMPEL

Working across a wide range of media, Lothar Hempel stages elaborate theatrical possibilities, placing the viewer as an autonomous character engaging in his constructed dramas according to their free will. Stemming from an interest in value and identification systems, Hempel’s paintings exist as potential casts for his interactive dilemmas. In this series of paintings, Hempel designs a parade of figures: identical in stance, each character is defined by their aesthetic properties; painting itself becoming an extension of persona, ideology and storytelling. In Golden Triangle, Hempel’s figure is a tragicomic muse: his face painted as a grotesque Venetian mask, and is sinister in uniform, adorned with a rainbow coloured tutu. Hempel frames his perverse presence with designer elegance; harlequin tiles and dead black-green buds suggest both a dandyism and courtly intrigue. Underlying themes of contemporary politic are neutralised for the viewer, creating not a portrait, but an instance of ethical quandary.

Following the format of ancient friezes, Lothar Hempel’s figures play out scenes of high drama from their stiff and stylised positions. In Kindl, Hempel paints a statuesque woman, a prototype heroine resplendid in diva-esque fashion. Hempel’s simply rendered background is suggestive of minimal theatre sets and allows homely formalism to give way to urban mystery. Drawn in hieroglyphic profile, Hempel humorously focuses on her eye; the only vivid indicator of explicit action, he paints it with the dramatic trepidation of crime film posters.

Drawing from the timeless morality of myth, Lothar Hempel pictures the heroic Jason as a god-like form, a portent of tragedy. Taking reference from ancient Greek theatre, Hempel’s figures rely on a minimum action and presentation in order to maximise the audience’s imagination and response. Characters’ attributes are defined solely by their costumes, their emotions by sculptural masks. His figures’ stylised stance and armless torsos restrain overt gestures of action, their ‘storytelling’ unfolds from symbolic and psychological interpretation rather than physical illustration. In Jason, Hempel paints his figure standing over a two-toned ground, walking from white to black: a climatic moment foretelling fatal misadventure.

In Medea, Lothar Hempel paints Jason’s wicked counterpart as a ruthless femme-fatale. Her fractured and calculating state of mind is echoed through the angular patterns and sharp strata of her dress and ground. Bold colours and geometric shapes allude to strength of character; her face a contrast of soft amoeba-like blotches, relating a feminine humanity and diseased corruption. Placed on a steely grey backdrop, Hempel gives this figure a supernatural dynamism, the wrath of a woman scorned echoing in timeless and placeless dimension.

Through a simplified and stylistic form of painting, Hempel creates a sense of a theatrical charade. His figures are suggested as impostors, knowing hypocrites or deceptive pawns of unseen and elaborate fictions. Hempel uses painting as a tool of illusion. His dream-like and surreal forms don’t pretend a reality, but constantly reinforce their staged-ness. Reminiscent of Bertolt Brecht’s ‘epic theatre’, Hempel’s formalist compositions and puppet-like figures don’t provoke emotional engagement, but rather the viewer’s detached critical reaction to the presented narrative. In portraits such as Richard Wright, Hempel sets up scenes of plausible mystery and adventure as analogies of the viewer’s self-reflection and moral judgement.