Master of Disguise - Harper's BAZAAR October 2021

German artist Volker Hermes breathes new life into classical portraiture with a surreal, contemporary twist

Philosophy student turned painter Volker Hermes is also something of an incidental fortune teller. Ten years ago, the German artist began a series of hidden portraits in which he takes paintings by the Old Masters and digitally manipulates them to obscure the subject’s face with masks and veils. In 2021, his photocollages are more relevant than ever: “I never expected that masks could one day be part of our everyday life,” he tells Harper’s BAZAAR. “I did not imagine such a pandemic in my wildest nightmares.”

Hermes explains that shrouding the sitters’ faces was initially intended to force viewers to interact with historical portraiture in a different way. “We are used to looking the sitter in the face, as a person you’re meeting, but there is so much more to discover in these paintings,” he says. These elaborate portraits of society’s elite are riddled with long-lost codes of fashion, symbols and metaphors that a lay contemporary art viewer no longer understands. We know they’re rich, but our intel ends there. “I exaggerate these symbols, multiply them, make them visible,” Hermes says.

The coverings have an ominous, almost sentient air as if they slowly enveloped the subject in real-time as they were sitting for their portrait: lengths of silk ribbon wrap themselves around a woman’s hair as if left behind by the flourish of a rhythmic gymnast or as Medusa-like snakes in a trance; ruffled collars grow, layer by layer, up a sitter’s face until only their forehead is visible; blindfolds unfurl to encompass everything from the shoulders up.

Hermes sources images from major museums worldwide and then uses Photoshop to take elements of the original and reshape them. Recently, he worked with Christie’s New York to modify portraits for the auction house’s Classics Week. “I pay attention to the artists’ idiosyncrasies to create a comprehensible second version of the portrait,” Hermes says. “I’m a painter, so I don’t want to destroy these old paintings; I want to revive them for a contemporary point of view.”

This story originally appeared in the October 2021 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR.