Protect Us From What We Seek | New Viewings | Galerie Barbara Thumm | 2020

What is it that makes us leave our cosy homes to explore the great outdoors? To sleep on the ground, climb mountains and glide down gorges? Desires one feels probably even more in these times.

Lucia Kempkes focusses on the emotional and psychological effects related to the mountain scenery. Her work series “I Wish I Could Climb” and “To Protect Us From What We Seek” play on the contradictory lives of adventurers: Cozy carpets show mountain peaks. Some bring the always improving tools that humankind develops to reach the impossible and conquest nature back home: They’re woven out of paraglider fragments. In her recent drawings Kempkes goes as far as to eliminate people and human traces from the images of heroic landscapes following the travelers’ illusion of an untouched.

Lydia Korndörfer
Curator