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hidden portraits
For the viewer, the focus in my modified pictures shifts away from being the expression of an individual and towards the integration of painting in a social context. The “Hidden Portraits” examine the context of art as a means of representation and the relationship between image and reproduction.
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NFT Collection
hidden portraits
Ten years in the making, Hidden Portraits reinterprets historical paintings through a modern lens. Using only elements from the original work, contemporary artist Volker Hermes visually manipulates famous Old Masters portraits, exploring expression when the face is obscured.
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NFT Collection
animalis poyledae
My collages are based on historical drawings of animals, either from early scientific expeditions or natural history studies. Using image processing, I transform individual parts of the drawn animal bodies into geometric shapes. In a final step, I combine the original drawing and the polyhedron to create a hybrid new animal.
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NFT Collection
academic studies
The historical drawings are pre-studies for paintings or exercises. I painted polyhedric forms as watercolors and inserted them in a digital collage as a head in the drawings. Previously pure geometric constructs, become emotionally charged when combined with studies of the human body.
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hidden leighton: volker hermes reimagined hisorical paintings
A collaboration between Volker Hermes and the Lieghton House was just announced during the re-opening on October 15th. The contemporary artist looks to Leighton's A Noble Lady of Venice for the latest in his series of Hidden Portraits.
The New York review of books
Hidden Jacometto graces the cover of the October, 2022 issue New York Review of Books.
TOH Magazine: volker hermes and his masked court
“The portraits of Voler Hermes have become so current, so much so that they also acquire political and cultural connotations, pushing us to reflect between the coded messages of the portraiture of the great masters to the semiotics of the new forms of representation...”
suited, booted, convoluted
A collaboration with Hamish Bowles, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the National Gallery of Scottland. (April edition of The World of Interiors) Hermes was invited to create a Hidden Portrait from a Portrait of Charles Coote, 1st Earl of Bellomont
by Sir Joshua Reynolds.
