“My paintings are like my children sometimes and it really hurts, if one of them are gone to a wrong place.”
Unmasking the Beautifully Absurd
In a world that increasingly filters discomfort through polished surfaces and curated illusions, Juliane Hundertmark brings a raw, unfiltered perspective through her singular blend of visual storytelling. Based in Berlin since 2005, the German painter has forged a reputation for her eccentrically layered work, where grotesque humor and social critique coexist in unsettling harmony. Her practice straddles the line between comic absurdity and tragic reflection, exposing the paradoxes that shape modern existence. Hundertmark doesn’t shy away from confronting societal trauma, instead painting through it, often with a theatrical, burlesque twist that draws the viewer into her sardonic yet deeply human observations.
Born in Mainz in 1971 and raised in a small village surrounded by forests, pets, and rural stillness, Hundertmark’s formative years imbued her with a sensitivity to the natural world that subtly permeates her work. Animals, both real and symbolic, frequently appear in her paintings—not as passive subjects but as reflections of human folly and the skewed dynamics between species. Her formal training spans multiple disciplines: painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg, stage performance at a theater school, and ceramic design. This multidisciplinary background informs the theatricality and tactile richness of her work, which often includes oil paint layered over fragments from old books. Hundertmark’s art brims with commentary on human behavior, particularly how the relentless pursuit of status, beauty, and wealth can lead to absurdity and alienation.
Despite her distinctive voice and visual vocabulary, Hundertmark’s early career was anything but easy. Struggling to sell her paintings, she opened her own gallery to showcase not only her work but also that of fellow artists. Her move to Berlin was a pivotal decision, driven by the city’s dynamic art scene and broader opportunities for connection and exposure. Over time, participating in international art fairs expanded her network, bringing her work into conversation with galleries, collectors, and peers worldwide. Through perseverance, she carved out a space where her peculiar blend of satire, surrealism, and critique could resonate across borders.
Juliane Hundertmark: Satire Painted in Oil and Collage
Hundertmark’s visual language resists easy categorization. Her paintings unfold as chaotic tableaux that combine traditional oil techniques with whimsical elements reminiscent of comics and expressionism. By weaving in surreal fragments and collage pieces from old cooking, animal, and nature books, she anchors her fantastical figures in recognizably domestic textures. This deliberate juxtaposition creates a dissonance that both unsettles and invites interpretation. Her preferred medium, oil on canvas, allows for continuous reworking, lending her pieces a living, evolving quality. She often integrates elements so seamlessly that it becomes difficult to distinguish between what has been painted and what has been glued onto the surface, blurring boundaries between constructed image and found reality.
A recurring theme in her work is the absurdity of modern ambitions. Through exaggerated characters and twisted narratives, Hundertmark satirizes society’s obsession with superficial success. The desire to be rich, beautiful, or socially accepted is dissected with biting wit, yet without overt moralizing. Her grotesque figures might appear clownish or monstrous at first glance, but they always carry a kernel of truth, reflecting the quiet despair and contradictions of everyday life. Whether it’s a smirking businessman with a bird’s head or a group of women in exaggerated fashion poses surrounded by crumbling symbols of wealth, her canvases function as visual essays on contemporary values and the masks people wear.
Animal treatment, a topic close to Hundertmark’s heart since childhood, remains a central thread throughout her oeuvre. She critiques the way humans dominate and devalue animal lives, often using anthropomorphic imagery to blur the lines between predator and prey, victim and abuser. These works are not sentimental but confrontational. By placing animal behavior side by side with human pretense, she exposes hypocrisies and hidden cruelties embedded in cultural norms. Her paintings don’t merely represent animals—they accuse, question, and mourn. Through these unsettling juxtapositions, Hundertmark reveals how deeply entangled the ethics of human behavior are with the way society treats its most vulnerable creatures.
The Lost Painting and the Persistent Echo
Among Hundertmark’s most personally significant works is the painting titled Community, a piece that encapsulates both her aesthetic approach and emotional investment. Inspired by a film still from the 2007 horror film 30 Days of Night, the painting depicts a group of individuals who appear simultaneously unified and ominously detached. They stand together like a forced alliance, a collective whose harmony is built on unease. This particular painting was tragically lost, an event that deeply affected Hundertmark. Unable to let go of its significance, she made the unusual decision to recreate the work identically—a process she describes as both painful and healing. In her words, this effort ensured the “community” would remain with her forever, untouchable by loss or misplacement again.
Hundertmark often speaks of her paintings as extensions of herself, even likening them to children. The loss of a piece, especially one with such layered meaning, is not simply about ownership or market value but a profound emotional rupture. The recreated Community now stands as a symbol of persistence and emotional resilience, its haunting figures holding space for both horror and love. It conveys the complexity of human coexistence, the tension between individuality and forced unity, and the contradictions of belonging. Through this work, Hundertmark lays bare the emotional cost of creation and the deep attachments artists forge with their subjects.
The idea of horror in her work is never gratuitous. It functions as an emotional and philosophical lens, a method of exposing the grotesque not just as spectacle but as truth. Drawing inspiration from arthouse cinema, particularly the psychologically rich and disorienting films of David Lynch, she explores how the strange and surreal can clarify rather than obscure reality. Her love of horror is not about fear itself, but about its capacity to communicate the discomfort of being alive. That tension—the simultaneous dread and affection for humanity—is at the heart of Community, and of Hundertmark’s practice as a whole.
Juliane Hundertmark: Puppets, Distractions, and New Frontiers
Hundertmark’s studio practice is not confined to static painting. Her workspace is a dual existence: a room in her apartment for quiet creation and a larger studio where chaos and experimentation take center stage. There, old mannequins, handmade puppets, and found costumes become co-conspirators in her expanding exploration of narrative form. She produces video works using these props, crafting scenes that extend the narratives suggested in her canvases. For her, distractions are not interruptions but fuel—inputs that breathe new life into familiar materials. Surrounded by her works-in-progress and favored tools like oil paints and vintage photo scraps, she nurtures an environment of constant stimulation and creative friction.
A growing area of interest for Hundertmark is the integration of artificial intelligence into her process. Rather than viewing AI as a threat to traditional art, she embraces it as a source of inspiration, particularly for creating animations and short films that echo the unsettling aesthetic of her paintings. These AI-generated experiments allow her to animate her grotesque imagery in new and unexpected ways, combining puppetry, painting, and digital motion. Her YouTube channel features some of these eerie and atmospheric pieces, each expanding the visual lexicon she has spent years developing. By marrying analog methods with digital tools, she opens up fresh territory for her darkly humorous and socially engaged narratives.
Looking ahead, Hundertmark aims to push her multidisciplinary approach even further. She is developing new installations and theatrical concepts that bring together puppets, video, and visual art in immersive formats. These expansions are not detours but logical progressions in her artistic journey, driven by a desire to invent new languages for age-old questions. Whether through canvas, collage, costume, or code, Juliane Hundertmark continues to construct bold, disquieting, and captivating worlds—places where satire meets sincerity, and grotesque figures whisper truths no one else dares to speak.
