Daniel Hauptmann

Daniel Hauptmann (*1980 Hamburg) lives and works in Berlin. He studied Fine Arts at the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst in Hamburg and graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in 2016.

Using a combination of everyday objects and construction materials, Daniel Hauptmann creates assemblages that blend tropes from both painting and sculpture. Drawing from the relationship between nature and culture, Hauptmann’s motifs are often elements of anthropocentrically constructed nature, such as leaves, branches and tree trunks. His works oscillate between smooth surfaces with sketched elements, and large-scale collages in which engravings and three-dimensional objects suggest landscapes.

Central to his practice is the hybridity of his own European-East Asian identity and the different cultures he grew up in. His most recent works in wood can be described as monochrome panel paintings and are concerned with differing perspectives on beauty in the Occidental and East Asian histories of painting. While a traditional Western perspective could be summarized as associating beauty with realistic representations of nature, East Asian perspectives often find beauty in smooth surfaces that are perceived as fabulation. In Hauptmann’s oeuvre, the two cultural entities merge to create his own formal and pictorial language.