German artist Lothar Hempel named his recent exhibition at Anton Kern Gallery after a poem of his, “Oral Heart.” Like the poem that initiated an expanding body of the artist’s writing, the show is an amalgamation of image ideas. Paintings, sculptures and drawings are the sparkling fragments of a dynamic whole, like the prismatic reflections of a powerful sunbeam. “Oral Heart” animates the intimate spaces of the third floor gallery with a multitude of materials: steel-framed paintings on Dibond aluminum, photo montages printed on cutout acrylic glass, steel masks, and pencil-and- ink drawings. Hempel further develops motifs of a practice that reflects his experience as painter, sculptor, musician, choreographer and filmmaker. The pieces on view materialize the artist’s distinct outlook on the interaction between art-making and being in the world. Hempel choreographs faces, objects, bodies, and m
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