Andy Hope 1930

Andy Hope 1930 (the artist formerly known as Andreas Hofer) combines conceptualism with a radically representational practice. He draws the universe of the imagination using a vast range of media, and extending the realm of the pictorial from flat image to relief, sculpture, installation and meta-installation. His art takes equally from real and fictional subjects, dissolving the difference between the two so as to create a phantasmagoria that is rooted in collective culture.

Signature

Since 1998 most of the artist’s works are signed ‘Andy Hope 1930’ (although at that time the artist was still named Andreas Hofer). The signature points to a pivotal year in history when the utopian aspirations of the modern movement gave way to darker forces within Europe, pausing the clock at a time when the destiny of the world hung in balance. The Americanism of the name recalls Andy Warhol, whilst allying this with spiritual optimism. A persona, Andy Hope stands between the artist and his work, camouflaging his intentions as it multiplies the scope of his invention. Since 2010 the artist uses this conflicting sign for his own name.

Style

Andy Hope’s style is instantly recognisable; an intentionally non-arty mode of representation that borrows from Thriftstore painting, comic books and science fiction illustration, mixing these elements with extreme artistic positions such as those of Kasimir Malevich, James Ensor, Marcel Duchamp and Paul Klee. It plays with a messy or childlike “hand” and exaggerates a painterly gesture, involving the uncontrolled dripping of pigment, a simplification of motifs and alla prima brush stroke. He creates over-paintings, collages and cut-outs: using pencils, coloured pencils and felt-tip pens, oil, enamel, and acrylic, on such supports as cardboard, paper, canvas, recycled materials and hand-made tapestries. He also makes films and sculptures, and text too plays a major role in his works, inscribing his imagery with energetic statement. His subject matter defies definition, encompassing such anachronistic and fantastical phenomenon as superheroes, dinosaurs, devils, spaceships and historical villains. It refuses any hierarchy, instead giving free reign to the iconography of mass media, science fiction and out-of-fashion painting to describe what the critic Noemi Smolik writing for Artforum has described as ‘the realm of pop icons, of dreams and nightmares, of imagination itself.’

Junk Shop

In 1996, Andy Hope moved the contents of the Munich thrift store Puschmann to an art space where they were assembled for sale together with works from a number of other artists. Paintings and drawings by Andy Hope depicting landscapes and replicating famous works by Kazimir Malevich were stuck on top of patterned wallpaper, forming an interconnecting montage in which lines flowed from one image into another and subject matter assumed the importance of signs. By positioning his work amidst junk and adopting the subjects of older artworks, Hope broke with many of the conditions that safeguard contemporary art, disregarding the progression of art history and its logic. ‘c/o Puschmann’, Hope’s first exhibition, is returned to again and again in his art; a place of beginning that pointed backwards and beyond the accepted boundaries of high art.

Superheroes

Hope’s oeuvre is populated by superheroes from the Golden and Silver Age of Comics — Flash Gordon, Batman, Super Man and Wonder Woman — and such futuristic objects as spaceships, laser beams and fantastic uniforms. A series of works focusing on Flash Gordon was followed by the exhibition ‘Batman Gallery’, 2004, which physically created a fictional space, and the continuing suggestion of superpowers in his works. Illusion is posited as meaning, allowing the warped time and space experienced in comics to permeate his art.

Phantoms

Time is upended in Andy Hope’s art, which simultaneously blends pasts, present and future. Exhibitions such as ‘Sweet Troubled Souls’, 2007, ‘Phantom Gallery’, 2008, which took place simultaneously in Zürich and Los Angeles, and ‘Air tsu dni oui sélavy’, 2009, employ traces of fictitious pasts and spectral doubles. Hope frequently paints over the top of already painted canvases, sometimes allowing parts of the earlier picture to remain visible so that their ghostly presences haunt his images. Conversely, other works are cut into, removing the vital features such as eyes or whole faces, as though extracting their personalities.

Exhibitions/ Labyrinthine Infinity

The overlapping times and spaces witnessed in his works conjure what Hope has referred to as ‘Labyrinthine Infinity’. Subjects are cut loose from history and are free to communicate with those of other works, forming narratives that are ambiguous and fluid. Individual works are elements within larger installations, which are liable to be re-grouped and multiplied by the artist, creating endless permutations of meaning. Almost all of Hopes exhibitions create a certain atmosphere, setting the single works within a scenic installation and fusing the conditions of the space and the works into a telling unity.

Solo Museum Shows

2011 Robin Dostoyevsky by Andy Hope 1930, Centro de Arte Contemporaneo, Malaga

2010 Andy Hope 1930 at the Freud, The Freud Museum, London

2009 White Space Black, Oldenburger Kunstverein, Oldenburger

Andy Hope 1930, Sammlung Goetz, Münich

2007 The Long Tomorrow, MART Herford, Herford

2005 Welt ohne Ende, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Münich

External links

Artfacts

& Wirth]

Kunstaspekte

Artnet

Guido Baudach]

Christine Mayer]

Pictures New York]