About the Works

In her series Broken Soldiers Deborah Sengl further pursues a long-standing theme of her work: the relationship between victim and perpetrator.

Sengl's depiction of the soldier is fundamentally different for the heroic glorification of the warrior/soldier we find in European art from its beginnings in Greek sculpture. Sengl's focus is rather on the traumatized and broken individual, the man in despair over his own deeds, the human being who is at the same time both perpetrator and victim. No man is born as a soldier or as a criminal, it is outer circumstances, be it war, economic hardship or exclusion, humiliation and disrespect, oftentimes from an early age, that create the necessary conditions for increasing radicalization and the dehumanization of the "other." The demonization of the enemy, oftentimes depicted as a wild beast or as somehow sub-human, as well as the way the horrors of any kind of warfare are made light of, are  presented and revealed in all of its shocking absurdity.

Translation: Dr. Martin Oskar Kramer