Bastian HoffmannRadical Negation

Guided by a Dadaist, kinetic or conceptual formal language, the work of the Köln-based artist Bastian Hoffmann (*1983) stages an ambivalent game with the everyday: walls that possess a dynamic life of their own, or puddles whose apparent incidentalness is in fact subject to rigorous planning. The dissolution of familiar everyday contexts of use occupies an omnipresent position in the artist’s œuvre. Each of his works thereby departs from fixed expectations and brings to the fore an artistic source of inspiration with a partly playful, humorous tendency. Bastian Hoffmann not only questions the general materiality of the objects he employs; rather, he shows that materiality, like the supposedly normal contextualisation of objects, is constructed through the way they are handled and used. Or, as the artist puts it: “I make use of the freedom, in the creative process, to disregard the meaningfulness and productivity of an act and to circumvent compromise. Stones, cars and puddles can in this way become objects of analysis and of reflection, far removed from any striving for productivity, efficiency and economic viability. The resulting works are then products of this experimental search for the unknown forms of possibility of an object or of a thought.” And so he is currently crushing a Porsche Cayenne by hand and with the simplest of means into pigment, from which a brushable paint is to be produced, serving him in turn as the basis for large-format paintings.

Exhibition:
sprengel@feinkunst, Hannover, 13/4 – 23/6/2024