QUEERING ART HISTORY lars hilfling
In my artistic practice, I merge photos from i.g. social media, sports and news with visuals from classical art and explore how cultural narratives are constructed and unfolded over time.
The past may be dead, but history is alive and it is constructed in the present.
When you look at art history with a queer glance, you will discover that art history is not just a registration of events, but also a deletion of the past.
Suppression of minorities - and women - over the centuries has deleted countless human narratives from our shared memory.
An important part of my work is to re-insert the queer themes that have been omitted from art history or embedded as coded messages for the queer communities of the past. For them art served as the world's first kind of encryption.
Other recurring themes in my artistic practice are masculinity and the dynamics of power related to gender and sexuality.
"Everything is about sex, except sex," as Oscar Wilde said. "Sex is about power."
I create my work on a computer but the process is manual.
A single work can easily be merged from 50 different photos or more. All contemporary figures in my pictures are composed of many different photos of body and face parts and therefore completely fictional. A kind of handmade deepfakes.
All prints are printed in limited editions as high quality archival pigment prints on fine art paper.
Lars Hilfling / 2021 Lars hifling