Hans Hemmert Germany, 1960-2024

Hans Hemmert was a German conceptual artist known for his witty, deeply imaginative interventions into public space and material culture. Born in Hollstadt, Hemmert worked at the intersection of sculpture, performance, and design, bringing an idiosyncratic sensibility to the built world. A co-founder of the influential artist collective inges idee, Hemmert helped redefine the landscape of contemporary public art in Europe through playful, sometimes surreal gestures that probed the thresholds of communication, absurdity, and social order.

Whether manifesting as towering balloon creatures, electricity-obsessed wooden dolls, or long-legged garden workers in sculptural drag, Hemmert's forms were whimsical but never frivolous-anchored by acute technical ingenuity and the logistical complexity demanded of public work. His multidisciplinary practice drew from a wide material vocabulary-models, sketches, posters, digital renderings-united by a belief in the public realm as a site for joy, friction, and speculative reimaginings of the everyday.

Over a career spanning more than three decades, Hemmert exhibited widely across Germany and internationally, including solo and group presentations at institutions such as Museum Folkwang (Essen), Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (Santiago de Compostela), and MoMA (New York), where his work was included in the seminal 2011 exhibition Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects. His final major exhibition, Inge's Idea. of Street Bunnies and Dancing Electricity Pylons (2024), underscored his enduring commitment to transforming public environments through humor and strangeness. His work is held in public collections including Kiasma - Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki) and CGAC (Santiago de Compostela).

Hemmert's legacy lives on in the world he playfully deformed-reminding us that sculpture can be soft, civic, and a little bit mischievous.