Lukas Hofmann: Bio
studio@lukashofmann.net
Lukas Hofmann (*93) has presented his work e.g. at Moderna Museet in Malmö and Stockholm, the Schinkel Pavillon and SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, Art in General in New York, Brussels Gallery Weekend, the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen, National Gallery in Prague and PLATO Gallery in Ostrava; during Manifesta 11, he performed at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. In 2018, he received the Jindrich Chalupecky Award, the most prominent Czech award for visual artists.
In the course of collecting some information to write this bio, we let out one of the Black beauty stick insects, Peruphasma schultei. Pinny legs, one by one, up his Kenzo sweater, juice-pink vestigial wings. As if to propose an axiom to start speaking about the work again, he says, “It looks so nice on the sweater. But we could always say that – ‘this sweater looks nice on you’ or ‘you look nice on that sweater.’”
Although Hofmann works mainly in the field of performance, his artistic practice reaches out to various other fields and media: he relates to the artistic milieu as well as the world of fashion, where he is occasionally active as a stylist and model, and he is also busy as a curator.
As an artist who grew up in Prague during the 90s and who is now staging performances across the countries of an increasingly unstable European Union, contingency and informality are reoccurring elements in the narrative of his life. He spends his time moving from place to place, leaving behind drops of lavender oil on the bedsheets he sleeps in. A nature child living within urban surroundings, he uses performance as a means to create archipelagos of increased presence that block out the feelings of desensation and dissociation awaiting outside the gallery door.
Hofmann’s works involve a carefully curated group of actants chosen from his immediate social surroundings. While he does take a leading role during the preparation of the pieces, he blends in with the crowd as soon as the performance starts. Along with his peers, he slides down museum handrails, deforms his face by pressing it against panes of glass and forms a red line between his body and theirs using thread and a sewing needle. At some point, the group stands still in formation as if posing for a fashion editorial, pretty and unbothered faces clad in deconstructed garments.
At a glance, this gasping and drenched clan enact separation issues, fears for the future, feelings of ineptitude and desensitisation. It is perhaps also emblematic of Hofmann and his contemporaries’ precarious experience of working in the creative industries who, untethered from a home, find friendships in wider circles as they gig around Europe.
However, within what appears anxious and strained, the artist provides a counterbalance effect of amusement and explorative play. These movements analyse the limits of a constructed reality and sense of self in order to reveal or will an alternate in which we have the power to act.
For a moment, their attire takes centre stage. Whether he uses pieces stolen out of Ikea wardrobes or clothing provided by designers such as Ottolinger, Stefanie Biggel, Louise Lyngh Bjerregaard and Anne Sofie Madsen, Hofmann manages to add a cohesive personal touch to the styling of his performances. After an extensive instant of stillness, there is a sudden and simultaneous outburst of gasp, cough and sharp exhalation- the group has been holding its breath for the entire time.
Hofmann’s work is difficult to define, but not because of a gestalt that encrypts a meaning that feels too late or too soon to access, but because his work becomes more of a zeitgeist, which has to be read through the medium of contemporary art itself. Everything is exactly as it appears, and that itself is suspicious. However intimate it feels, its alienability pushes the public to different levels of abstraction.
Hofmann’s philosophic stance is really a straddle, more of a swaying. As a skeptic, he will affirm that most of his identity-work and work-identity is performative, self-built, and discounts the possibility of truth or holding possession of one’s opinion. He’s a brand, ably navigating promotional channels and the gyres of networking.
When he uses Google Maps to direct him somewhere, arriving precisely at the time it predicted, he feels he is the mediator or a piece of data for the app rather than the app being an instrument he utilises. Nevertheless, his art is laced with a trenchant lyricism – call it poetry or “nostalgia for something I don’t even know, being a cool eco-child or something.”
studio@lukashofmann.net
Texts by Nat Marcus, Donna Schoens, Pablo Jose Ramirez, Caroline Heron
Artportal interview on Hofmann's practice, Pablo Jose Ramirez on Hofmann and Jindrich Chalupecky Award, Mousse on A guiding dog for a blind dog, curated by Hofmann, i-D Germany on Retrospective eng, L'Officiel Italia on Phantom Limb, Glamcult Magazine on Dry Me a River, Sleek Mag on Frenzied Chirping and Enzyme, Novembre on lkea made fashion, DIS Magazine on L'Eau des Algues, kubaparis on Retrospective
Lukas Hofmann: Bio
In the course of collecting some information to write this bio, we let out one of the Black beauty stick insects, Peruphasma schultei. Pinny legs, one by one, up his Kenzo sweater, juice-pink vestigial wings. As if to propose an axiom to start speaking about the work again, he says, “It looks so nice on the sweater. But we could always say that – ‘this sweater looks nice on you’ or ‘you look nice on that sweater.’”
Although Hofmann {*93} works mainly in the field of performance, his artistic practice reaches out to various other fields and media: he relates to the artistic milieu as well as the world of fashion, where he is occasionally active as a stylist and model, and he is also busy as a curator.
As an artist who grew up in Prague during the 90s and who is now staging performances across the countries of an increasingly unstable European Union, contingency and informality are reoccurring elements in the narrative of his life. He spends his time moving from place to place, leaving behind drops of lavender oil on the bedsheets he sleeps in. A nature child living within urban surroundings, he uses performance as a means to create archipelagos of increased presence that block out the feelings of desensation and dissociation awaiting outside the gallery door.
Hofmann’s works involve a carefully curated group of actants chosen from his immediate social surroundings. While he does take a leading role during the preparation of the pieces, he blends in with the crowd as soon as the performance starts. Along with his peers, he slides down museum handrails, deforms his face by pressing it against panes of glass and forms a red line between his body and theirs using thread and a sewing needle. At some point, the group stands still in formation as if posing for a fashion editorial, pretty and unbothered faces clad in deconstructed garments.
At a glance, this gasping and drenched clan enact separation issues, fears for the future, feelings of ineptitude and desensitisation. It is perhaps also emblematic of Hofmann and his contemporaries’ precarious experience of working in the creative industries who, untethered from a home, find friendships in wider circles as they gig around Europe.
However, within what appears anxious and strained, the artist provides a counterbalance effect of amusement and explorative play. These movements analyse the limits of a constructed reality and sense of self in order to reveal or will an alternate in which we have the power to act.
For a moment, their attire takes centre stage. Whether he uses pieces stolen out of Ikea wardrobes or clothing provided by designers such as Ottolinger, Stefanie Biggel, Louise Lyngh Bjerregaard and Anne Sofie Madsen, Hofmann manages to add a cohesive personal touch to the styling of his performances. After an extensive instant of stillness, there is a sudden and simultaneous outburst of gasp, cough and sharp exhalation- the group has been holding its breath for the entire time.
studio@lukashofmann.net
Texts by Nat Marcus, Donna Schoens, Pablo Jose Ramirez, Caroline Heron
Artportal interview on Hofmann's practice, Pablo Jose Ramirez on Hofmann and Jindrich Chalupecky Award, Mousse on A guiding dog for a blind dog, curated by Hofmann, i-D Germany on Retrospective eng, L'Officiel Italia on Phantom Limb, Glamcult Magazine on Dry Me a River, Sleek Mag on Frenzied Chirping and Enzyme, Novembre on lkea made fashion, DIS Magazine on L'Eau des Algues, kubaparis on Retrospective.