Klaus Ferdinand Hempfling’s current visual language
cannot be fully categorized within any existing art movement.
The term MYTHOPOETIC EXPRESSIONISM describes a unique artistic position: a style of painting situated between free gesture, archetypal imagery, and immediate human experience.
The paintings do not explain.

Mythopoetic Expressionism of KFH describes a painting that does not merely show the visible world.
The images may look spontaneous, wild or childlike, yet they carry ancient human themes: birth, fear, courage, power, innocence, transformation, animal force, home, dignity and death. The paintings are not illustrations of myths. They create new myths from immediate perception.

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 *Dance 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 Disappears”—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 disapproval 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.