MATCH SHOW 10.21.04 press 10/11/04 12:59 AM Page 1
MATCH RELEASE PRESS artSPACE
Marc de Bourcy, Director
CONFRONTATIONS BY Harald Hoffmann de Vere
A SOLO EXHIBITION OF COLLAGES, PAINTINGS, AND DRAWINGS OPENING RECEPTION: OCTOBER 21ST 2004, SIX TO NINE O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING
MATCH artspace is delighted to announce the first gallery exhibition in New York by German artist Harald Hoffmann de Vere. Hoffmann de Vere’s work deals with issues of place, structure, material, design, and surface with a raw conceptual and historical sensibility.
‘CONFRONTATIONS’, a solo exhibition of collages, paintings, and drawings by Hoffmann de Vere, revisits a sliver of German history as the artist captures the change of Berlin, from former island city to German capital. The title of the show Confrontations is derived from one of Hoffmann de Vere’s work, Confrontation, in the singular mode, which Hoffmann de Vere says was suggested to him at the time, on August 13th 1961, upon looking at U.S. and Russian tanks sitting across a small barbed wire fence in Berlin, at the brink of another world war. From that singular moment in history, Hoffmann de Vere uses abstraction to shift our focus to plural forms of ‘CONFRONTATIONS’, from fear of the enemy (Feindbild) between East and West, to fear of the enemy between ‘us’ and ’them’, in today’s troubled times.
The viewer is pulled again and again into the iconic places of the former divided city: the Brandenburg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie, the Potsdamer Place or the Oberbaum Bridge, all reflecting the breaks as it were in German history, rendered in Hoffmann de Vere’s dialectic in a singular way. These places in Berlin became not only focuses of division, but also symbols and bridges of reunification.
Mixing various media, from Oelfarbe and acrylic to Fotocollagen, from silk screens to technology-animated posters and papiers collés, Hoffmann de Vere brings into focus and onto his large canvases, facets of old and new Berlin, Berlin by day and by night. The artist confronts our preconceived ideas of construction and de-construction, with reinvented inference to structure and architecture. In Hoffmann de Vere’s dialectic, the new Berlin constantly mutates; in ‘Checkpoint Charlie’, enormous construction cranes interlock in the sky over a Babylonian Potsdamer Platz. Re-interpret- ing the many strata of that open physical construction hole (Baustelle), Hoffmann de Vere’s collage paintings act both as layers of space and tracks of time; they do offer us multifaceted versions and loaded fragments of emotional stimulation. The artist’s packed collages, their staccato rhythm, poignantly connect to a city trapped, divided and encircled, and yet, waiting to be restored, reborn, reconstructed.
Hoffmann de Vere was born in Berlin in 1945. He went to an American kindergarten. Throughout primary school, he lived in the U.S. sector in Berlin and was always confronted to Americans. At age 18, Hoffmann de Vere made his first painting, an East Asian garden landscape, inspired by a wall carpet that hung in the parental living room in Zehlendorf. In 1982, the view changed; the painter moved into a large studio nearby the Oberbaum Bridge (Oberbaumbrücke) that spans the river
115 WEST 23RD STREET LOFT 61 NEW YORK, NY 10011 ☎ 646. 287. 5340 MARC@ MATCHARTSPACE.COM MATCH SHOW 10.21.04 press 10/11/04 12:59 AM Page 2
Spree in the south east of Berlin, linking Kreuzberg, formerly in West Berlin, and Friedrichshain, formerly in East Berlin. Directly under Hoffmann de Vere’s large windows were border patrol boats on the Spree; behind his studio, death strip, the Wall - the scar in the face of the city. From 1963 on, the Oberbaumbrücke became infamous as a pedestrian border crossing point used mainly by elderly visitors from the East.
In the years between 1968 and 1975, Hoffmann de Vere went to art school Hochschule der Künste (HdK) in Berlin and was master pupil with Prof. Hann Trier. While at art school at HdK and during art residencies and workshops the like of Atelierhaus Worpswede and Naganuma, Japan, Hoffmann de Vere became increasingly intrigued by works of Lindner, Rauschenberg and Warhol. Hoffmann de Vere’s first trip to the US, and to New York, was in 1971. He would not return before 2003. The emergence of Pop Art and Pop Culture had a huge impact on him, as a young German living in New York in the seventies.
Exhibited in major European private and museum collections, Hoffmann de Vere feels particularly at home in New York. The city, he says, reminds him of Leonard Cohen’s words about a bridge between New York and Berlin, ‘First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.’ Just as Manhattan, Berlin was once an island, encircled by the Wall and sustained through airlifts.
For further information, please contact Marc de Bourcy, Director, MATCH artspace at (646) 287.5340. Viewing by appointment only.