Lothar Hempel: Alphabet City

Lothar Hempel (born in 1966 in Cologne, where he lives and works) is the author of one of the richest and most complex artistic practices on the contemporary scene. His installations usually combine paintings, drawings, collages, photographs, sculptures and videos, all of which combine to create a kind of fascinating theatre.

Alphabet City is Lothar Hempel’s first retrospective. As well as offering an overview of the artist’s interests and experiments since the beginning of his career, it features new works made specially for Le Magasin. In all, over sixty pieces will be exhibited: works on paper (collages, photographs), videos, sculptures and installations. Each room will give in insight into a particular phase of Hempel’s artistic development through a series of new installations.

Hempel transforms the exhibition space into a stage on which the visitor becomes an actor in a story full of cross-references and contradictions. The works are at once the synopsis, the set, the characters and the props of a play. They represent the different parts of a narrative created out of references to German history, psychology, Greek tragedy, cinema, music, political and social history and neurology for instance.

Hempel also borrows a number of different styles and strategies, whether invented by Dada, Constructivism, the Bauhaus or Joseph Beuys. He uses visual metaphors that are both simple and extremely complex, by incorporating images or found objects. The emotional responses elicited by the various associations that can be made all question moral, ideological and ethical issues and point to the failure of utopias, including socialism and modernism. With this poetic and transcendent theatre Hempel engenders a psychological state between consciousness and dream, inviting us to change our perspective on contemporary realities, and to imagine our own role.

The exhibition will be accompanied by the first monograph on the artist, with texts in French and English (JRP/Ringier, Zurich).

Pressetext

Lothar Hempel
Alphabet City
Kurator: Florence Derieux