Angela Hampel

Born in 1956 in Räckelwitz near Kamenz in the Bezirk Dresden of East Germany (now Saxony), Hampel trained as a forestry worker from 1972 to 1974.

After spending a year arranging programs for young people at the Kamenz culture centre, she continued studying painting and graphic art under Jutta Damme and Dietmar Büttner at the academy until 1982.

She created a number of prints and paintings on the topic, expanding to include Penthesilea and other important female figures from mythology and the Bible, such as Judith and Salomé.

The art historian Karin Weber explains: "Angela Hampel's name is closely linked to the neo-expressive artistic movement in the German Democratic Republic in the 1980s when painters sought to intervene with formal ecstasy in the conflicts of the times.

What Remains: Responses to the Legacy of Christa Wolf (Oxford: Berghahn, 2022), 244-64 April Eisman, “Art and Controversy in Dresden: Angela Hampel and Steffen Fischer’s Mural for the Jugendklub Eule (1987),” in Kunst in der DDR – 30 Jahre danach (Kunst und Politik: Jahrbuch der Guernica-Gesellschaft, 2021), 85-97 Angela Hampel: Eine Künstlerin aus Dresden 1982-1992 (Berlin: Janus, 1993)