Olav Westphalen

Olav Westphalen, born in 1963 in Hamburg, Germany, is known for blending humor, cartoons, and conceptual art to explore our cultural blind spots and social contradictions. He studied design at FH Hamburg and visual arts the University of California, San Diego, where he worked closely with Allan Kaprow, a pioneering performance artist. Westphalen’s work spans drawing, painting, sculpture, and performance, often balancing on the line between popular culture and fine art, using raw humor and dry poetry to reveal uncomfortable truths beneath familiar surfaces. A member of the cartoon duo "Rattelschneck," he produces comics and cartoons regularly featured in major German publications like Die Zeit, Titanic and Süddeutsche Zeitung. His art works have been exhibited internationally in institutions such as the Whitney Museum, Moderna Museet Stockholm, and the Swiss Institute, and is represented in major collections including MoMA and Centre Pompidou. Westphalen has been a professor of performatoive practices at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and currently holds a professorship in "Drawing etc." at HfBK Dresden. In 2020, he coined the term "The Palliative Turn" to describe a necessary and ongoing paradigm shift, away from phantasies of contol and mastery. He became one of the founders of the Association for the Palliative Turn a lose and growing movement of artist, scientists, healers, comedians and philosophers.