MANZUR KARGAR
“I am not interested in the truth; I am interested in splendid appearances”
At the age of 5 years, I had to move from my native country Afghanistan to Berlin / Germany and since then I have felt torn away from home and alienated from the real world in away. Later I discovered painting and music for me. Art has always given me the opportunity to create a cosmos, a world of my own in which I could feel familiar and at home. A world that is much more exciting and colorful than reality. I never had another choice but to become an artist.
As a young artist, I was focused primarily on early classical art, looking all the way back to Hellenistic Greece. In the last decades, I got more interested in reproducing mass media images of contemporary advertising through painting. My inspiration comes from glossy magazines, television, and the Internet. The artistic exploration of “advanced” civilizations is central to my work. No matter which era inspires me, I always depict the human figure as shaped by its time.
With the combination of digital and classic art, my paintings mark the span of painting from the original emotional base into the inevitable digital age. Digital aesthetics translated into classical paintings.
