David Hafer García is a contemporary painter currently based in Vienna, Austria. The artist has produced a heterogenous body of work, which investigates contemporary forms of cultural hibrity from a painterly perspective. His recent works compromise watercolor and ink based drawings and paintings on amate paper, rich with references to mythology, history, and contemporary urban culture. Alongside these, he produces heavily layered oil paintings formally reminiscent of Impressionism, Neue Wilde, and Art Informel, which probe the intersections between still life and abstraction.

Hafer García’s work is defined by its engagement with new forms of creolization in contemporary urban environments, drawing upon his own dual heritage as a German with Guatemalan roots. His compositions juxtapose symbols and motifs from Mesoamerican mythology, contemporary politics, Guatemalan cuisine, modern German history, global mass culture, and the history of art, among other things. This synthesis characterizes his artistic voice, where contrasting narratives and iconographies converge to reveal unexpected affinities and tensions. Through this complex visual vocabulary, his practice articulates both personal and collective dimensions of cultural hybridity.

In his most recent works, created during a stay in Mexico, the artist emphasizes the material and historical resonances of amate paper, paying homage to its millenary Mesoamerican traditions of spiritual, scientific, and artistic expression. By deliberately avoiding cotton or linon based canvas, he highlights the fact that painting traditions have developed independently across the globe, contesting the dominance of the Western canon. Furthermore his installative strategies seek to expand the parameters of pictorial presentation, challenging the notion of the painting as a framed, autonomous object—a concept rooted in bourgeois Enlightenment ideals. In doing so, David Hafer García questions the monolithic authority of linear, western art history and argues for a plural, non-linear understanding of painting and its trajectories.