I am a faculty member at the Institute for Social and Cultural
Anthropology at the University of Hamburg/Germany.
Im an artist and anthropologist. The one inspires the other, both
are important. Poetry and politics, color and concept. Practically,
this means that I paint, take pictures and build sculptures and
installations.
In painting I am dealing with different subjects like the
layeredness and transparency of our luminous world, the illusion of
modernity, the incompleteness of our blurred perception and our
consciousness in the pseudo-modern life-speed-rush. My paintings in
oil, acrylic and many mixed-media techniques, using e.g. fire, felt
pens, ash or beaten gold are often compositions from purloined,
distorted photo snippets on the border between the figurative and
the abstract.
My sculptural work is more clearly influenced by fundamental
considerations and experiences from my many fieldwork encounters in
Europe and Africa about people and the environment. In my
installations I am dealing with issues such as consumption, excess and
deficiency, exclusion, the visualization of discourses or our
miraculous environmental action. Nato wire-fence, consumer goods,
food, plants, masks, birds nests
So Im a hybrid, an anthrographic artist, interested about us people
immersed in our environment, as well as our perception of this
environment. Important to me is the continued experimenting and
experiencing search that also understands art as an extremely exciting
addiction and leads to new forms of expression.
Email: michael.proepper@uni-hamburg.de