First, the Artist

Those who know the name Klaus Ferdinand Hempfling probably don’t know him as a painter. They know him as the man who, in the 1990s, shook the equestrian world with his book *Dancing with Horses*—as someone who demonstrated that completely non-violent interaction with horses is possible, without a system, without a method, solely through presence and inner clarity. He is known as an international bestselling author, a consultant to families and executives on six continents, and one of the most followed personalities on German-language social media.

What he is not usually called first: an artist.

Yet he was first and foremost an artist, and has remained so without interruption. At eighteen, Hempfling exhibited his first works. Just a few years later, he was teaching at the Dortmund University of Art and Design. He brought theatrical works to the stage. The decades that followed did not take him away from art—they simply carried it into other realms. The horses were art with a different material. The family and life coaching was art with a different material. And now Klaus Ferdinand Hempfling has returned to his studio in Denmark, partly to present his emerging work anew. He has returned to line, color, and paper. Home.

The Works

What one sees when viewing these images for the first time is an explosive, sometimes unsettling, always vibrant energy. The black line—placed in oil pastel or acrylic—is the structuring skeleton. She is sovereign. She doesn’t hesitate. She possesses the quality of something created from an inner impulse, not from deliberation. And then the background: color that doesn’t illustrate but pulsates. Yellow that burns. Red that is distributed like heartbeats. Blue that cools and sustains.

The titles: “The Boy Who Searches for His Father”—a work that, with its intensity and compositional boldness, stands out from the rest of the portfolio and yet speaks to every other piece. Or “Sleeping Woman,” “A Handful of Water,” “When Fear Subsides,” “A Person Who Is Not Afraid of Death,” “A Woman Carrying a Stranger’s Child.” They are not descriptions of what one sees. They are doors. You stand before the painting, read the title, and feel something begin to stir within you that would not have been set in motion without the combination of image and title.

The Method

The creative process behind these works is so unusual that it must be described.
Each painting begins with the title. Not as a retrospective naming, not as a thematic guideline to be illustrated—but as an arrival. The title emerges. Then the hand moves. What follows often lasts only moments. No preliminary sketch. No drafting phase. No corrections—ever. Not because Hempfling rejects correction, but because he understands the principle of non-correction as the highest declaration a person can make to a moment: I was fully present. What emerged, emerged fully.

This attitude—the promise to the paper that is the same promise he has kept for decades before the world’s most dangerous horses—is not impulsiveness. It is the maturity of someone who has learned that the first, uncensored, complete expression is the only honest response to a moment.

The speed of these works is not their weakness. It is their proof.

Art Historical Context

Those who look for connections will find them—and yet find them inadequate.

The paintings resonate most strongly with the Cobra movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s: Karel Appel, Asger Jorn—the Dane with whom Hempfling shares a curious geographical and intellectual resonance—and Pierre Alechinsky. The same expressive immediacy, the same archaic pictorial symbols, the same color as pure emotion. In the dense sign systems of individual works, qualities of Jean Dubuffet’s Hourloupe period emerge; in the lyrical openness of Paul Klee’s early works, echoes; in the calligraphic energy of certain lines, an affinity with the late Cy Twombly.

But every comparison touches on one aspect and misses the whole.

What distinguishes these paintings from the aforementioned models is their origin. Appel, Jorn, and Alechinsky came from the European avant-garde, from manifestos and movements and a conscious break with academic traditions. Hempfling came from the forest. From decades of absolute presence before horses and humans. From a mythological and anthropological deep dive into the traditions of ancient cultures. This gives these images a quality that in English would be described as unmediated—direct, without the filter of art history, without the self-awareness of avant-gardism.

The term Mythopoetic Expressionism was coined for these works—not to confine them to a category, but because no existing term fully captures them. It is the first and so far only example of this designation.

What these images do

There is a distinction in art appreciation that is rarely discussed as precisely as it deserves.

A window image shows you the world. A flower, a sunset, a dancing figure—the subject exists outside the artist, and the image grants you access to it. You look at it and recognize something external.

A door image shows you yourself. It doesn’t open outward but inward—into something you already carry, already know, already feel, without having had the form to look at it. It gives visibility to the invisible within.

Klaus Ferdinand Hempfling’s paintings are all, without exception, doors.

“When Fear Recedes”—one expects stillness, tenderness, resignation. What the painting shows is the most explosive yellow in his entire portfolio, an energy that is almost impossible to contain. The receding of fear doesn’t leave emptiness—it leaves life in its most complete form. Anyone who feels this without being able to articulate it beforehand has truly seen the painting.

“The Boy Who Searches for His Father”—a work created in a single night, on a canvas that the artist then contemplated while lying exhausted on the floor, realizing: he could make a correction to the corners. He knew how. He left it. These two incoherent corners represent the uncertainty of the search—according to Hempfling himself. The painting was not allowed to be more perfect than its subject.

The Return

There is a temptation to interpret these works as late work—as a creative awakening that, after decades of interruption, returns to his original craft. This interpretation is wrong.

Klaus Ferdinand Hempfling never stopped being an artist. He put his art aside as long as life demanded something else. What is emerging now is not the rediscovery of a forgotten skill. It is the fully ripened fruit of a life that has always drawn from the same source.

The paintings embody this. Not as a message, not as a program—but as undeniable evidence of something that has passed through a person who has spent decades learning to be completely present. In every line.

Klaus Ferdinand Hempfling is presenting these works to an art audience for the first time.

Art was always there.
Klaus Ferdinand Hempfling is not “also an artist.” Art was always there. It is not a later addition to his work with horses and people, but one of its deepest sources. Long before his various fields of activity took their current form, there was drawing, design, and an artistic way of perceiving the world.
Line, movement, tension, rhythm, relationship—much of what would later characterize his work with horses and people is already present in his artistic vision.

Thus, painting is not separate from his other work. It leads back to its origin.
Before working with horses, teaching, and working with people found their own form, there was already line, movement, rhythm, and the immediate grasp of an inner state.
… What later became visible in different areas stems from the same source.

The zebra is one of the most powerful symbols in Klaus Ferdinand Hempfling’s art because it unites wildness and form. Its body is already a living drawing: black and white, rhythm and camouflage, visibility and mystery. It is close to the horse, yet it refuses the human world in a completely different way. The horse can become a bridge. The zebra remains a threshold. In Hempfling’s paintings, the zebra is never merely an exotic animal. It asks how the human being relates to wildness: by wearing it, fearing it, using it, admiring it — or finally learning to move with it.

For Klaus, the zebra is not the next step after the horse. It is the boundary at which even mastery must stop. The horse can enter a profound relationship with the human being. The zebra remains fundamentally wild and untouchable. This is not a failure of skill, but a recognition of truth. Not everything that resembles the horse belongs to the human field of relationship. In the paintings, the zebra may appear, carry, protect, challenge or guide — but it is never possessed. Its dignity lies in remaining free.

So – Klaus transforms the zebra into the ultimate symbol of the unbendable spirit. To invite a zebra into a painting is to declare an absolute veto against conformity. It is a visual guarantee that the raw truth of nature will always break through the glass ceilings of corporate and social control.

The painted women in Hempfling’s art are not decorated bodies. They are bodies turned into language. The markings are not fashion, costume or ornament in the superficial sense. They suggest belonging, memory, ritual, nature, experience and inner transformation. The body becomes a surface where life has written signs. In many of these paintings, the figure is not exposed but revealed. The painted body does not ask to be consumed by the viewer. It stands as a living place where instinct, dignity, vulnerability and power meet.

Body-Painted Women in Klaus Ferdinand Hempfling’s Art:

Klaus’ painted women are not decorated bodies. The body becomes language. The markings are not fashion, ornament or costume in the superficial sense. They suggest belonging, memory, ritual, nature, experience and inner transformation.

The painted body is not exposed. It is revealed. The woman does not become an object for the viewer. She becomes a living place where instinct, dignity, vulnerability and power meet.

The painting on the body does not cover her. It makes visible that the body itself can be a sacred place. The body here is not merely anatomy. It is posture, memory, courage, sensuality, protection and transformation.

A painted woman in Klaus’ work often carries her inner world outward. She is not disguised. She is revealed. Her sensuality is not consumption. It is presence.
The true “garment” is not fabric. It is dignity, self-possession and the courage to appear without false covering.

The feminine in these pictures is not reduced to beauty or softness. It becomes a living principle of body, nature, courage, seriousness and transformation.
Klaus’ body-painted women stand between nature and culture, instinct and consciousness, vulnerability and sovereignty.
They are not sentimental figures.

Every line in these paintings is a first line.
Hempfling paints without preliminary drawing, without sketches, and without a single correction — in minutes, one stroke after another. This is not a technique. It is a stance: what has been set down is stood by. The trained hand can polish a lie until it shines; the uncorrected line cannot lie at all — it shows exactly what was there in the second it was made, hesitation and certainty alike.

But do not confuse correcting with continuing.
A painting may call the painter back. That is the difference between fixing a mark and standing by it long enough to finish what it started. This should not be confused with haste. In Hempfling’s art, speed often means that a long inner preparation suddenly becomes visible. The painting must arrive before the mind interferes too much. A line can be alive only if it still carries the force of the moment. A picture is finished not when everything is polished, but when the living balance has appeared — and before the next stroke would weaken it.

Speed is the ultimate filter against the doubting mind.
When Klaus paints with rapid, wet-on-wet strokes, he is bypassing the analytical, calculating ego that seeks to create a “perfect,” polite product. It is Zen-painting in its purest form. A line struck in a moment of total presence carries the accumulated weight of a lifetime of insight. The painting is simple because it is essential; it is fast because truth doesn’t hesitate.

The childlike quality in some of Hempfling’s paintings is not a lack of skill. It is a return to directness. A child draws before the mind has learned too many conventions. Hempfling’s line often carries this immediacy, but behind it stands experience, discipline and perception. The image may appear simple because it has removed what is unnecessary. This is very different from being simplistic.

A Few Lines, a Whole Being

Look at any face in these paintings. Count the strokes. Two dots, a mouth, perhaps the hint of a brow — rarely more than four marks, and yet there stands a complete human being, with an age, a mood, a history. A shy young hunter. A manager who has learned what she shows. A courtesan present behind closed eyes.

How is that possible? Because leaving out is not the same as doing less. To set the two strokes that hold a sixteen-year-old’s shyness, one must have seen that shyness a thousand times — in faces, in postures, in the angle of a lowered head. These faces are not inventions. They are distillations of fifty years of reading living beings: horses that speak only in the smallest signs, and people, long before they say a word. It is not three strokes. It is fifty years — and three strokes.

The titles in Hempfling’s paintings are not labels. They are second entrances. A painting may first appear abstract, playful or chaotic — then the title opens a deeper field. The titles do not explain the picture away. They create tension. They invite the viewer to look again, and often the painting changes completely through the words.

So – do not look for explanations in these titles. There are none. The Singer Who Forgot His Lyrics. The Moon That Has No Problem Not Being the Sun.

Each title tells you just enough to step inside — and then leaves you there, in your own life. That is not vagueness; it is precision of a different kind. An explanation closes a painting: once you know what it means, you are finished with it. A door does the opposite. Whoever steps through one of these titles does not learn a story. They recognize one — their own. This is why two people can stand before the same painting and see two different truths, and both are right. The painting does not change. The person walking through the door does.

Even when the themes are heavy — war, fear, death, power, collapse, loneliness — Hempfling’s paintings remain alive, colorful and strangely hopeful.

This is not naïve optimism. It is a refusal to let darkness own the whole picture. The paintings do not deny danger. They let danger enter. But they also preserve movement, humor, tenderness, rhythm and life-force. The result is not decoration, but affirmation: life is difficult, and still it shines.

The figures in Hempfling’s paintings are often caught in difficult roles: king, commander, courtesan, manager, strongman, hunter, child, mother, seeker. Yet they are not reduced to these roles. The painting sees them without final judgment. This is deeply connected to coaching. A true coach cannot begin by condemning. He must first perceive the state of the human being. The art does the same. It reveals, but it does not imprison.

In Hempfling’s life-work, art, horse-work and coaching are not separate activities. They arise from one source: the ability to perceive living states. With horses, this means reading movement, balance, trust and presence. With people, it means recognizing role, fear, potential, transition and authenticity. In painting, it means allowing a figure, animal or world to appear with the fewest necessary means. Three paths — one source.