Harald Hermann is an established mid-career contemporary artist, who was born in Germany, like other well-known artists such as Miriam Böhm, Max Scheler, Thomas Kiesewetter, Ilona Herreiner, and Arthur Köpcke.Born in 1976, Harald Hermann was primarily influenced by the 1990s growing up. In the United Kingdom, a group of artists known as the YBAs, or Young British Artists, dominated the artistic culture of the decade. Harald Hermann’s work is an invitation to a journey through utopian landscapes and gloomy pictorial worlds. He creates his own cosmos on canvases of varying formats, in part by superimposing multiple planes of imagery, with quotations and details, creating echoes of fleeting thoughts and stories long gone. The arrangement of motifs allows for absurd spaces and bizarre situations to take place, forming a hybrid window to an unexpected thought periphery. Hermann orchestrates spaces and architecture, nature and landscapes and in doing so he builds a stage for his paintings, which is inhabited by spectral figures and where everyday objects attain a magical quality. Similar to an art chamber or a curiosity cabinet, the painter arranges costumed characters, translucent buildings, rubble and ash, as if they were collected treasures. Humankind, nature and culture merge to form an impenetrable thicket in a parallel world that ignores our spatial dimensions. Masquerade and symbols of death and transience only add to the confusion between truth and illusion, between the present, past and future. In the spirit of Romanticism, the free and creative imagination is encouraged to break boundaries and to dissolve the distinction between reality and fantasy. But the dream-like, unconscious, supernatural elements of his work in no way romanticize reality: Hermann subversively breaks up of his motifs, creating a hyper reality, which through the eye of the beholder allows a new vision of what is real. Is he depicting the end of days, in which the last of our kind try to salvage the decaying remnants of a culture? Or is it a new beginning, celebrating the triumph over time and space while drawing eternity from the well of mortality? The protagonists hide their intentions behind costumes. They fade away like hallucinations or delusions, leaving the observer no choice but to immerse himself in Hermann’s imaginary worlds and to daydream in his cosmic landscapes and horizons. Harald Hermann lives and works in Lisbon and Berlin.