Merzmensch - Mask Collector

From the series: HalluciNation
Paper: Hahnemühle Fine Art Archival Print
Sheet size: 40 × 40 cm with 1 cm white border around the motif.
Year: Edition of 2025
Edition: 3 + 1 AP
Signed, dated and edition numbered by the artist on a separate label.

MERZMENSCH – Mask Collector

A labyrinth of eyes stares back at the viewer. In Mask Collector, Merzmensch places a solitary, elderly figure amidst a dense collection of ethnographic-looking masks—each one eerie, each one observant. The work appears like a tableau vivant from a forgotten anthropological museum, yet its visual construction immediately betrays its digital origins. Evoking both nostalgia and unease, the image combines the aesthetics of historical documentation with surreal invention.

The title "Mask Collector" plays with multiple meanings. Is the figure a scholar? A hoarder? A keeper of lost identities? Or is he, paradoxically, one of the masks himself—hidden behind the illusion of knowledge, the fiction of history? His posture is formal but uncertain, as if he, too, were being observed and catalogued.

The series title, "HalluciNation," is a conceptual anchor. A combination of "hallucination" and "nation," it suggests an invented cultural memory—a territory shaped not by geography, but by dreams, distortions, and the digital unconscious. In this speculative ethnography, Merzmensch uses AI to remix signs and symbols from the collective imagination, questioning how (real or imagined) histories are constructed, curated, and mythologized.

Mask Collector is a haunting meditation on identity, memory, and the masks we inherit or invent. The work invites us to reconsider the authenticity of visual archives in the age of algorithmic image production.