FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 13 – June 10, 2006
Reception: Saturday, May 13, 2006, 6-8 PM
PETER ALLEN HOFFMANN New Landscapes
In the current climate of bad= good, ugly= better and grotesque= best, Peter Hoffmann's work is somewhat of an anomaly, and frankly, astonishing. He is a painter’s painter in the truest sense of the word - the work is about paint, canvas, landscape, tradition and beauty, and above all the richness of the artist's and viewer’s inner life, brought to light. In his oversize, epic landscape paintings, Hoffmann treads new footing in very old terrain; areas previously navigated by Courbet, Redon, and the American and French luminaries, and more recently by our own Hartley, Burchfield, Avery, and Dove.
Hoffmann's work celebrates the supernatural; glazed layers of distance and foreground are blurred and redefined by a visionary's naked quest for the truth. Hoffmann unabashedly painted many of these bucolic scenes from a hyper-urban studio at Hunter College in Hell’s Kitchen, where he has recently concluded the graduate program. He is a native Pennsylvanian, which in part might explain the sun-bleached, rural palette and luminous wide-open spaces; but that isn't enough to explain his approach. Hoffmann's choice of landscape as subject is actually quite radical; non-trendy; fraught with levels of projection and meaning, ghosts and epiphanies take root in undulating, sensuous horizons, ridges, lakes, hills and valleys. A lot takes place in these seemingly benign pastorals; which in fact are more political than self-proclaimed political work. Given the current administration's callous treatment of environmental issues small and large, Hoffmann's scenes conjure up a fragile yet potent metaphor of loss, fleeting utopia and dystopia. The canvases are parables for our time, in which global warming will forever change our perception of the natural world, in which Katrina-like disaster alters our version of natural harmony forever.
New Landscapes is Hoffmann’s first New York solo show. His work has been featured in group exhibitions in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Berlin. He recently completed his MFA from Hunter College in New York.
In the project space: DOUG FISHBONE The disarming innocence, stream of consciousness and irreverent deconstruction of language are some of the hallmarks of the video work of Doug Fishbone, a Brooklyn-born expatriate now based in London, and heralded all over Europe. Fishbone is also obsessed with gorillas, obesity, inter-net porn, McDonalds and the solar system. Fishbone appropriates one-liners, sight gags and Freudian slips from the worldwide web much in the same way as stand-up comics do, albeit clothed in a conceptual artist’s language and attire; he recently has branched into actual live sets of the material, one of which will be presented at Joe’s Pub on May 9, 2006, to coincide with the exhibition. This will be the New York debut of several video works including “Towards a Common Understanding”, a Python-esque, tongue-in-cheek academic jaunt through History and the Meaning of Life, which premiered at Program in London in 2005, and was then shown extensively by the gallery at art fairs this past year in Paris, Miami, Zurich, Los Angeles, and New York. Additionally, Fishbone’s work has been reviewed in numerous publications including Artforum, Frieze, Modern Painters, among others. He is a graduate of Goldsmiths College and has received numerous awards including the Beck’s Future in 2004. His work is also included in the traveling British Art Show 6, a retrospective of British art held once every five years.
For more information, please visit the gallery’s website or contact C. Sean Horton (Director) or Nick Lawrence (Owner) at 212-989-8700 or info@freightandvolume.com.
