In responding to our digital culture at-large Hammwöhner responds to the impressions of the surrounding media platforms by creating a new surrealism. He extracts the narratives knotted by the carpet weaver and in his own style combines these built-in geometric abstract and figurative motifs found in the carpets, altering and playing with its scale right down to the frayed edges. Methodically he plays with viewer perception by turning a photographic representation of an artifact into a hyperrealist drawing of a representative object, the carpet.

Sebastian Hammwöhner’s most recent carpet drawings are abstract forms based on contemporary Moroccan Boucherrouite rugs that are hand produced using recycled fabrics. Pushing the boundaries of the carpet-drawings he scans the image then alters them in the computer, deconstructing, rearranging, and painting them digitally. The newly restructured virtual “carpet” then becomes the template pattern for the pastel drawings. Original artifact, virtual representation, appropriation, and copy are intertwined and mirrored. Real space becomes virtual space and vice versa. Old textiles, get new life as carpets and thereafter feats of trompe l’oeil illusionism through color and pattern.

Max Henry