BE THERE
Peter Hoffer : Selva AnticaPresented by Kathryn Markel Fine Arts June 4, 2009- July 17, 2009Reception: June 4, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pmPeter HofferNEW YORK, NY – April 29, 2009 – Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is proud to present the third solo exhibition of paintings by Montreal artist Peter Hoffer. Peter Hoffer’s work is based on the recollection of historical landscape paintings. Not specific paintings or artists, but rather the close-your-eyes-and-what-do-you-see inspiration of traditional landscape painting. Hoffer begins his process by distressing bare wood panels, then paints quickly, minimally and expressionistically to capture what he imagines in memory. The previous scrapes and gouges he worked into the wood are allowed to show through the over-painting, creating an old and weathered characteristic that further emphasize the history of his subject. Hoffer finishes the paintings with a ¼” top layer of poured resin. The artist refers to the resin as a “distancing factor”, a barrier between viewer and painting much like viewing a landscape through a car window. The glassy medium brings the seemingly historical landscapes into the contemporary and encapsulates the subject into a time and place. Peter Hoffer created 12 new paintings for Selva Antica, and introduces the split scene and combined landscape to his oeuvre of landscape painting. While each work is painted on one continuous panel, the imagery is divided into two or three split scenes of the same landscape, or, two or three different landscapes are combined side by side onto one painting. The process echoes the triptych and diptych tradition, used historically in landscape painting to extend the field of view and more extensively encompass the viewer. But again with Hoffer’s work it connotes a disjuncture, a discord between what we see and what we know, between history and contemporary – as if the windshield from which we’re viewing has been cracked and our view disrupted. Peter Hoffer lives and works in Montreal, Canada, and Paris, France. He exhibits extensively throughout Canada: Quebec, Ontario and Alberta; the eastern United States: New York, Boston and Chicago; and internationally in Paris, France. His work is in the collections of the Musée des Bauxs’ Arts in Montréal, Musée Du Québec in Québec City, the Royal Bank of Canada, Cirque du Soleil, and ING New York.
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