Sketch for “Walking Death”

In his artistic practice, Özgür Kar stages skeletons as morbid yet poetic protagonists who become projection surfaces for existential reflection. This recurring figure draws on the Danse Macabre – the late medieval allegory of the transience of all life. Stripped of their identity and social characteristics, the skeletons become foils for fear, desire, and mortality.

By combining baroque memento mori imagery with animation and theatre, Kar links historical pictorial traditions with contemporary narrative forms. The black-and-white drawings for the Kunstverein are studies for an animation of a walking skeleton. Each drawing captures a phase of movement, with visible pencil lines marking the individual steps of the gait.