Andreas Hofer - City of Sokrates

Galerie Guido W. Baudach is pleased to present its fourth solo exhibition by Andreas Hofer. Born in 1963 and currently living in Berlin, Hofer gleans an expansive host of elements and subjects from popular culture; comics, film noir and science fiction serve as sources for his inspiration. In his pictorial and sculptural work, Batman's logo emblem and Malevich's black square form flickering hybrids, church steeples tend to lift off as rockets into space, or the emblematic depiction of a gloomy bird appears as a signature. The artist’s motifs, which are slightly transforming all the time, are neither a matter of irony nor of esotericism, but manifestations of imagination at a highly experimental stage. Merging history with fantasy and swaying between recycling and invention, Hofer considers the relativity of the past and the future—what if past and future were equally uncertain? The end result is an abundance of possibilities in his artistic production, both in terms of formal aesthetics and content. Reflecting its premises and preconditions, Hofer's art targets the unknown.

The exhibition "City of Sokrates" displays a Hofer-typical arrangement of continuities and discontinuities, of connections and breaks. As usual, a variety of media—painting, drawing, collage, sculpture—is incorporated into an installation setting. The name Sokrates, as referred to in the title, does not indicate a retrospective of ancient Greece and the dawn of western thinking but is instead symbolic of a new beginning through intellectual reorientation.

Nonetheless, some traits and characteristics of the historical philosopher appear to be revived in the central painting "City of Sokrates": thinking practised in dialogue on a public square (agora), a "society" surrounding an active figure—in this case a female character entirely painted in white. However, the scene presents an array of confusing features. The bystanders seem to be paralyzed by a strange force imminating from the central figure. There are only female characters; but maybe these characters are not female at all and belong to a new species of an unknown gender, pervaded by virtuality and artificiality—robots, man machines, bio-chemical androids? The depiction seems to take place in the distant future, while the characters’ roles and behaviour appear to be staged. The scenery looks highly artificial; landscape and architecture are hard to categorise. Painted in silvery colours, the sky gives the impression of a metallic surface. This world, the "City of Sokrates" (or, as it is also called by Andreas Hofer, "Sky City"), is a machine of illusions, completely fabricated as reality.

The drawings, hung on a partition wall, also address connections between fiction and the real world. For Andreas Hofer, superheroes—a reoccurring presence in the paintings (as in his work in general)—show certain parallels to the function Greek gods once fulfilled, both culturally and socially. Superheroes infuse our world with ideas and narratives; and ideas and narratives can have a palpable impact on reality.

The sculpture "Alicia – The place is here the time is now", with its white silicone dress (which is designed by the artist), relates to the central figure of the painting "City of Sokrates". The face of the sculpture consists of a screen showing a numerical date often referred to by Andreas Hofer: the year 4419. The numbers are appearing one at a time, one after another, emulating layers. Hofer considers time as "...something one cannot explain or understand, but feel intuitively. It has a depth which it leaves behind in us, which it provides us with." Belonging to the sculpture, three paper sheets with handwritten text are attached to a column of the gallery room. The sheets are placed directly above each other in vertical format, reminiscent of an unfurled scroll. The Alicia figure and the text (written by Andreas Hofer) are merging as fictions, forming a distorted narrative with a severely askewed chronology and point of view. An imaginary dialogue between Alicia, another female character named Nova, and a narrator unfolds.

The sculpture "Flash", made of engraved mirror glass, is inspired by the superhero of the same name, who, as Hofer puts it, "can run as fast that he nearly vanishes from our dimension". With this sculpture, Andreas Hofer again examines the relation between time, depth, and artificiality. In his work, artificiality is always wrought with complexities, leaving depth to be more of a physical category than a philosophical quality. Time becomes, in a way, the actual medium of his art.

"Terminal Sky" consists of four printed canvases suspended across the gallery. They exist together in a row, reminiscent of a brusque montage of film images. The work enigmatically connects constructivist forms with the digital snow of a screen interference, the depiction of a group of Amazons, and a wallpaper-like pattern. The latter gives the impression of an LSD vision of a segmented canopy sky, composed of vignettes with a lodge-style emblem showing the depiction of a teardropping eye in its centre.

Placed opposite the printed canvases, and marked with an emblem featuring the letters of the work's title, is the styrofoam architecture "COS". The light building appears like a weightless science fiction temple—simple and impressive, as effortless as it is imposing.

By the arrangement of the exhibition elements, the gallery room itself is run through by diagonal lines. A dynamic unfolds; the elements seem to gain speed. The room vibrates and moves.

Andreas Hofer - City of Sokrates