Visual Arts

Within a short time, his drawings, paintings and installations found an enthusiastic circle of collectors extending to the U.S.A. Now Andreas Hofer, a shooting star in Germany’s contemporary art scene, has his own individual exhibition in the Goetz Collection. Once again, Hofer demonstrates the sovereignty with which he is able to cocoon entire rooms with his rough, raw use of signs.

Even the most practiced art observer might well go slightly mad after a while in this high-visibility picture gallery, in part lighting up in poison-green. Originals hang over the reproductions that completely wallpaper the room’s surfaces right up to the ceiling. Here and there, a vitrine or imaginative framing stands out relief-like from the figured poster tapestry.

An exhibition from collector Ingvild Goetz’ treasure chamber

With this individual exhibition, Andreas Hofer, who shot up into the art market’s higher price categories with lightning speed about five years ago, has provided Munich’s Goetz Collection with more than just this one, site-specific (i.e. specifically designed for a particular space), exuberant installation. On the ground floor, he built an oblique open space stage, freely derived from expressionistic film backdrop prototypes, including wildly gesticulating protagonists. And in the dungeon-like basement the viewer sees a child-like dragon floating in front of a purple column and a green wall, like a ragged, threadbare relic of the Augsburg Puppet Theatre.

But the true miracle of this exhibition has less to do with the fact that this artist, who presently lives in Berlin, has succeeded in uniting his art, which oscillates between the world of comics, borrowings from Gothic and archaic medieval elements, into a phantasmic mosaic. One is impressed by the fact that this solo show, encompassing over 70 works, was put together with pieces from Ingvild Goetz’ private treasure chamber alone, especially in view of the fact that Ingvild Goetz entered the Andreas Hofer market only four years ago (Hofer was already at that time being courted intensely by American art lovers). In her exhibition cube, designed by the Swiss architects Herzog & Meuron, Goetz – undoubtedly the most important German collector of contemporary art – has organised a museum-quality show that would do credit to many a state institution.

Superman, Batman, Silver Surfer

As an anomaly, Andreas Hofer, who likes to sign his pictures with the pseudonym “Andy Hope,” and sometimes shows off with ironically grand utopian gestures such as “Nova Dreamer” or “Lord of Illusions,” has been recognised comparatively late by the German art scene. This artist, who until his world-wide debut had been esteemed by insiders as a brilliant designer and so-called “psychonaut” (Veit Loers) especially on account of his abrasive ciphers, launched his international career when he was only 40. In time, Hofer, who was born in Munich in 1964 and studied at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, expanded his repertoire, dominated by chimeras, in the direction of large-format painting and installations. The latter consist mostly of deliberately make-shift wooden tribunes that he has cobbled together, such as those now in the Goetz Collection.

Hofers black-lacquered Batman Gallery, reminding one of a roofed kiosk and accessible by stairs, contains his drawings from 2003 and 2004. This recourse to the world of comics and its bat-costume inspirations, is at the same time a flashback to the ideological extremes of the period from the 1930’s through the 1960’s. This is the epoch in which not only superheroes such as Superman, Batman, and last but not least Silver Surfer were created who fought against evil in fiction, but also during which the most terrible of dictators struck terror throughout Europe with their lust for conquest and genocide in reality.

No chance for heroic glorification

In his wide-format painting THUNDER AGENT NEVADA DOOM 4419, Hofer reminds one of the gobelins of Werner Peiner, an artist who is hardly known any longer, but who found his major contractor in the German Federal Republic in the 1950’s – ion the wake of faithful service to the National Socialist state. In Hofer’s flaming landscape, the viewer sees a triumphant, black-masked thunder god in his solar chariot, racing away downright grotesquely over the scorched earth. The sporadic criticism that Hofer is pursuing a naive remythologisation of the Third Reich and its symbols therefore does not apply. In contrast to the panoramas of darkness that we have become accustomed to through Anselm Kiefer’s work, for example, Hofer avoids all pathos. The fact that the SS-insignia turn up here and there as ambigous references to Hofer’s Silver Surfer as well, also reveals the extent of the ambivalence concealed in this complex cosmos of signs.

His take: at the start of the 21st century, western utopias have definitively reached their end, drained and ruined by the inhuman core of a perfectly collectivised society. Hofer delineates a wasteland in which the old heroes, whether criminal or rescuer figures, languish in a phantom-like existence. His brushstroke, on the one hand full of vibrant energy, and then again petering out erratically as if suffering from infantile impulses, permits no heroic glorification. Over and over again, the viewer is also reminded of the ethnological inspirations of the Blaue Reiter. Andreas Hofer, a “borderliner” in the sense of a wanderer between worlds, derives his chimeras from the twilight between (art) history, comics and science fiction, for the purpose of – according to the American art theorist John C. Welchman – “suggesting the tragic, but ultimately illuminative interdependence of past and future on a phantom level.”