Lars Henkel‘s collages are only part of his story. He’s also a prolific illustrator, painter, film-maker and designer. However it’s his strange collages that interest me most. Perhaps it’s because the elements he uses in his pictures are quite limited; the images drawn from the Romantic era of the late 18th and early 19th Century, his colour palette minimal and his compositions formal. However within this narrow aesthetic he’s able to create a world that is rather macabre, full of strange Gothic half-human/half-animals, innards and organs floating, disconnected, free of the body, old musical instruments and implements working hard at some mechanical process.
In short Henkel’s world is melancholic, it lies in the collective consciousness of Western Civilisation. For this is a snapshot of a time past, a period of great change, of mechanics, puppets and automatons, of Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne, of Romantic motifs and references from Adalbert Stifter and Henry David Thoreau.
Here’s what he has to say about his work:
A part of the visual trail leads into the 19th century, but also to the first half of the 20th century. Socially, politically, culturally and aesthetically, it was an exciting era. Photos, images, objects all carry a previous history in themselves. Their traces allude to the life of another time. They are enriched with emotions and content that automatically flow into the art. For example, the photos of August Sander are still fascinating. Although they hail from an epoch that lies 100 years in the past, they have a weird effect. Precisely the portraits of older people show faces that no longer look like this today.