Jens Hof-memorial exhibition
Arrival and Farewell is the title of the multi-part exhibition on the occasion of the Hamburg-born painter Jens Hoff, who worked in Hanover and died at the end of 2018. The project, organised by Kunstverein Kunsthalle Hannover e.V. in cooperation with Galerie Holbein 4 and Kunstkreis Laatzen, aims to make the extensive work of the artist, who is little known in Hanover, accessible to a wider public in three largely parallel, coordinated exhibitions, starting with a retrospective at Kunsthalle Faust and special subject themes at the other exhibition venues. The artist’s virtuoso ability to apply his precise powers of observation to the creation of touching portraits and figurative representations, as well as objects and landscapes, and to extend these into a largely abstract colour space, is evident in the large and medium-format oil paintings, watercolour and ink drawings. Jens Hoff’s painting thus always seems to be characterised by a desire to dissolve boundaries and unite opposites.This peculiarity is also reflected in the chosen exhibition title Arrival and Farewell. It is borrowed from the title of a pictorial motif that, like many of the artist’s other pictorial motifs, can be derived from his wide-ranging interests, which include film, music, painting and literature in equal measure.
www.jenshoff.com
‘Jens Hoff’s paintings masterfully combine opposites in form and content. Abstract and representational strategies harmonise in his paintings, fact and fiction, dream and reality come together. The dialectical movement in terms of content also determines the painting in terms of form. On the one hand, the artist’s skilful oil painting quotes the illusionistic ideals of reflection of the past in its representationalism. On the other hand, with its limitation to two or three colours, the work is absolutely anti-realistic and highly artificial. This also applies to its formal reduction, its proportions and perspectives. The picture is painted flat rather than spatially. In this, it follows the truth claim of modernism, which the American art theorist Clement Greenberg formulated with regard to the abstract expressionists of his time as follows: ‘Make it flat! Paint it flat! Don’t fool the viewer with an X for a U! A picture is a picture is a picture!
Reality is something else. It wants to be captured in art in a symbolic way. Part of this symbolic transformation of reality is that the artist penetrates its appearance and creates his own image of it. At the same time, the different images of the same person are reminiscent of Aristophanes’ lecture on the origins of love in Plato’s “Banquet”. He reports that in primordial, blissful times, people had a spherical shape. Perfect in this way, they forgot to sacrifice to the gods. The gods, enraged, split them in two, and since then people have been searching for their missing half. The idea of paradise in Jens Hoff’s work in general! It is not possible without the devil. When the painter borrows Eve from Lucas Cranach the Elder’s ‘Paradise’ (1530), she is threatened in his work by a black monster that becomes more recognisable from picture to picture. The monster appears both dangerous and strangely protective in a painting by the artist, whose protagonist Hoff modelled on one of the young girls of the writer and painter Henry Darger, whom he held in high esteem. He has given his painting the same title as the North American artist gave his own work: ‘Jenny Is Wounded’. The monster also appears menacingly, if somewhat wearily, in Jens Hoff’s painting ‘Fischer’. In a way, he is an alter ego of the artist. Just as he dives for fish, Hoff is always looking for new narrative material in which he assures himself of the world through painting.’
(Text: Michael Stoeber)
Exhibition period:
Saturday, 28 September, until Sunday, 27 October 2019
Vernissage: Friday, 27 September 2019, 7 pm
Opening hours: Thu and Fri 4pm-8pm, Sat and Sun 2pm-6pm
Admission: 3 euros, reduced: 2 euros
A cooperation with Galerie Holbein 4 and the Kunstkreis Laatzen.
Vernissage gallery Holbein4: Saturday, 28 September 2019, 6 pm
Vernissage Kunstkreishaus Laatzen: Sunday, 3 November 2019, 11 a.m.
Supported by the Cultural Office of the City of Hanover and Sparkasse Hannover.
