Andy Hope 1930
Andreas Hofer aka “Andy Hope 1930,” is currently exhibiting his work in New York. I came across this artist’s work on another blog but couldn’t re-blog it because it’s on another platform so I thought I would make the effort to write a regular post about his work despite having 4 stitches in my left middle finger–good times.
Images from Hauser & Wirth
I’ve never encountered Hope 1930’s work before now and I was intrigued by the minimalist dimension of the work within this exhibition. Although this exhibit does include some beautiful minimalist work (which I can handle in measured doses), this is, I pleasantly discovered, largely atypical of his oeuvre.
He is, as evident by much of his work, a beneficiary of Polke who I blogged about here. Hope 1930 employs numerous media in an often incongruous manner juxtaposing images of the past with the present in seemingly nonsensical ways.
Employing artistic methodologies that can trace their origins to Duchamp, he brings disparate elements together which, if considered separately, have no discernible relationship to each other. As such, his work continues the Post-Modern dialogue by utilizing and melding together elements of pop culture, historical artistic imagery, modernism, and national history which forces the viewer to construe possible interpretations.
His work escapes easy classification and although this may be off-putting for the casual art viewer, I think that this his work provides an important contribution within a contemporary art scene that all too often applauds not the content of the artwork but the personality of the artist. His work says as much, if not more, about who we are within an emerging global community dominated by image saturation, mass consumerism, and the reconciliation of cross-cultural encounters as it does about Andy Hope 1930, the artist.
For more information, please see the following:
Musings 