"Schneeblind / Snowblind"
21/05/2008 – 26/06/2008


Press release

You can't describe bubbles. They change shape and colour, and then they burst. It's the same with a flush -
if you are inebriated, the reflective power is missing, and once it's gone, your head is drowning and you cannot believe that what yoU're remembering could actually have been reality.

On the contrary, you can describe the paintings by Swiss artist Hanspeter Hofmann very well. They show bubbles washed ashore on silver waves, whose colour is changing depending on the location of the viewer and the incidence of light, and on ostensibly white surfaces lines and cell structures appear, which are evocative of psychedelic patterns, and of pictures of skin cells and pathogens from the laboratory.

These forms arose at the beginning of the 1990s in a series of woodcuts by Hofmann called “In Vitro”, which have provided a canon of forms for the artist ever since. The structures evoke associations with scientific iconography and seem to be abstract, but in fact they are just as realistic as they are unrealistic, like the birds and snakes which Hofmann put above those structures in his earlier series.

On the nine new paintings, which are currently presented at the Engholm Engelhorn gallery, these microscopically tiny structures are enormous, similar to the waves on which the artist loves to ride with his surfboard.

For further information about the exhibition please contact Kerstin Engholm on +43 1 585 7337.