Eckart Hahn listens to audio books while he paints, favoring bizarre tales, horror stories and suspenseful detective novels. This literary influence flows into his intuitive selection of motifs, and colors the moods of his pictures, whose surreal poetic power exerts a captivating effect on the viewer. This can be partly attributed to how the artist transforms familiar genres such as landscape, portraiture, still life or the religious tableau into eerie scenarios. Plastic bags, paper or wax are modeled into people, objects, animals and landscapes. They go up in flames, change colors or switch to a different aggregate state.
These metamorphoses transpose the motifs into contemporary contexts. In this way, the works confront the constraints of civilized life, exploring its religious, familial, and social structures and how they are falling apart. They question traditional values as well as customs and habits, and mercilessly expose the fragmentation and changes taking place in our global media society.
Eckart Hahn (b. 1971 in Freiburg / Breisgau) studied photography, art history and graphic design. His works are found in prominent public and private collections in Europe, Russia and North America.

Editor: Claudia Emmert, Kunstpalais Erlangen
Authors: Claudia Emmert, Hans Jürgen Luibl, Marc Wellmann
Artists: Eckart Hahn

Softcover
24,5 x 30,3 cm
120 pages
84 color ills

German/English
available
ISBN 978-3-86828-281-8
30 Euro
2011