Michael Pröpper

Never Give Up - contemporary, figurative painting of people on the move

2019

Dr. Michael Pröpper, German, a mid-career artist who is a professional painter and anthropologist. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally over the past 15 years. I’m an artist and anthropologist. The one inspires the other, both are important. Poetry and politics, color and concept. Practically, this means that I paint, take pictures and build sculptures and installations. In painting I am dealing with different subjects like the ‘layeredness’ and transparency of our luminous world, the illusion of modernity, the incompleteness of our blurred perception and our consciousness in the pseudo-modern life-speed-rush. My paintings in oil, acrylic and many mixed-media techniques, using e.g. fire, felt pens, ash or beaten gold are often compositions from purloined, distorted photo snippets – on the border between figurative and abstract. Sometimes it’s simply about enriching with energy and emotion. My sculptural work is more clearly influenced by fundamental considerations and experiences from my many fieldwork travels in Europe and Africa about people and the environment. In my installations I am dealing with issues such as consumption, excess and deficiency, exclusion, the visualization of discourses or our miraculous environmental action. Nato wire-fence, consumer goods, food, plants, masks, birds’ nests … So I’m a hybrid, an anthrographic artist, interested about us people immersed in our environment, as well as our perception of this environment. Important to me is the continued experimenting and experiencing search that also understands art as an extremely exciting addiction and leads to new forms of expression.