animawiki

Painter

Leipzig, Germany

https://en.hartmutkiewert.de
https://www.facebook.com/hartmutkiewert/
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“Since 2008 I am working on renegotiating the human-animal relationship with the means of painting. On the one hand, the social status of animals has played a role in the visual arts since early cave paintings, on the other hand, art can question norms, power relations and traditional conditions and reveal new perspectives.

At the beginning of my artistic work on the social human-animal relationship, I painted meat landscapes and pieces of meat that were fed back to their original bodies, as an attempt to undermine the repression of the origin of yoghurts, wieners and schnitzels – to counter the absence of slaughter and the bad life of the animals with the presence of the painting mass, the meat colours, the materiality of the animals’ bodies.

Over time, however, I also tried to show other perspectives in my paintings: enraptured, utopian images of a different, possible human-animal relationship. Images in which pigs, cows and chickens are removed from the fattening facilities and slaughterhouses, appropriating parks, shopping malls and streets. The animal industry lies in ruins, and humans and other animals meet at eye level. A perception of other animals that is not marked by a desire to dominate and objectify, but shows them as actors, as subjects of their own lives, as related to humans”.

Hartmut Kiewert, “Study to No Cars Go”, 2021