In a world where compassion with all sentient beings and the concern over their welfare is considered extreme, radical and militant, some of Hartmut Kiewert's paintings indeed appear like a peek into the land of Utopia, sharing the artist's vegan vision and positive outlook of the days after animal exploitation, where humankind has finally learned to co-exist, to accept, to care and to share.
The German artist's work reveals the shocking picture of a shamefully convenient and ignorant society thousands of years after the ancient Romans, where steak and BBQ has become part of a human's rights, and where brutality and cruelty is an accepted part of everyday life.
In the 21st Century mass killing and exploitation is the life line of many industries, corporations and the stock market, and is widely supported by the majority of modern day humans, while in utter denial about the facts and the dark, brutal and deadly truth behind the white-washed, cute and pretty facade of the bloody animal agriculture, meat and dairy industry.
Born on 24.07.1980 in Koblenz Artist Hartmut Kiewert lives and works in Leipzig, Germany | "The moment of total access to the body through violence is the moment of practising absolute power/dominion. On the one hand the eating of meat is a symbol of dominion and a metaphor for this total grasp, on the other a life is de facto extinguished. That means power/dominion is used in its most extreme form – to assimilate parts of the animal’s body. The radical separation between humans and animals, which has been deeply inscribed in the human culture for thousands of years, bears a violence that has never been of such astronomical dimension as it is today. Hartmut Kiewert´s paintings are an attempt to subvert the blockades of consciousness against the exploitation of animals. The absence and repression of both the miserable life and the dying of animals is countered with the presence of painture, the prensence of flesh-colours and utopian perspectives on a cruelty-free world." |