Leni Hoffman
18.05. – 22.06.2003

Artist Leni Hoffmann has been making a name for herself since the 1990s with her unusual interventions in spaces and locations. The interventions of the “Knete-Fee” (plasticine fairy), as she has been described, with their Dadaist titles combine magic and irritation, craftsmanship, originality, spatiality and explosiveness, conceptuality and transience. Born in Bad Pyrmont in 1962, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg and made her breakthrough in 1992 with a solo exhibition at the Portikus in Frankfurt, directed by Kaspar König. This was followed by stays abroad in France, guest professorships in Nuremberg and Frankfurt, solo and group exhibitions at the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, the Lenbachhaus in Munich, and the Sprengelmuseum in Hanover, to name but a few. Since the 2002/03 winter semester, she has held a full professorship in painting at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. Leni Hoffmann has also exhibited at the Künstlerhaus in Bremen and the Overbeck Gesellschaft Lübeck.

Artistically, she sees herself as connected to non-representational, non-associative color field painting. Dr. Ulrich Wilmes from the Ludwig Museum in Cologne writes about her work: “The starting point for Leni Hoffmann’s works are the specific conditions of a place, whose spatial characteristics and functional conditions she explores. This particular place presents itself, on the one hand, as an architectural space that describes the static framework of a project and, on the other hand, as a sociocultural context that significantly influences the perception of the work. This means that the formal decisions regarding the exhibition venue are essential to the meaning of a work. The different historical conditions and social functions of public, institutional, or private spaces are individually taken into account when considering the realization of an image idea. In a figurative sense, Hoffmann’s work consists of images whose genre-specific boundaries are radically stretched. Plasticine, or “modeling clay” as the artist calls it, referring to its colloquial playful name, has emerged as her preferred material for realizing her pictorial ideas. It is used in bright colors that appear in diverse combinations. The malleable yet dimensionally stable mass is applied by hand. In the process, different organic, homogeneous surface structures are created, conveying a physical handling of the material.
Leni Hoffmann thus contributes significantly to a change in the static concept of art. Against this backdrop, the temporal limitations of her projects appear to be an essential, if not necessary, condition of an artistic concept of work, insofar as the consistency of the plasticine material also deliberately allows for gradual change in permanent installations.
Another characteristic of your work is its transience. We are therefore all the more delighted to be able to offer an edition to accompany the exhibition.

Curated by Klaus Becké.