UNTITLED | LUKAS HOFFMANN

Lukas Hoffmann is a German artist who declines his practice by creating installations. Each of his artworks is self-sufficient and lives independently, however a legible common thread, even if not founding, connects them. The genesis of each artwork is a constant work in progress that leaves room for surprises and open results, both formal and conceptual.
Untitled (2021) presents these ambiguous and complex characteristics of work, both from the objects and meanings point of view, even if reduced in the monochromatic simplicity of purple.
Cylindrical shapes mimic a tree, perhaps a trunk or maybe a boot, as they end in roots that look more like long foot toes.
The artwork is made starting from a MDF block – a wood derived material – and aluminum. This and the monochromatic use of purple, later applied only on the accessory elements, betray something natural and organic, although in a disturbing metamorphosis.

In Hoffman’s purpose, Untitled acts as a dissonant reference to a tree entity: because of the physiognomic resemblance of some of its parts – protrusions similar to branches, long tips that can be fingers or roots, sheet metals that look like leaves – as well as from the wood derived material with which it is composed, the view is initially deceived and led to believe that there is a resemblance between artwork and natural element. A resemblance broken by the color, unnatural for a cortex, and by the cold and gray concrete floor on which the work is located, an artificial place. A figurative game which is neither linear nor harmonious and which seems to deliberately leave this work unfinished.
An undone effect sought and wanted by the artist who literally dug the shapes, to make them empty and unclosed, almost unfinished, at the elements ends (or of a possible body?).

The overall feeling that Hoffmann’s artwork gives us is the impression that we must somehow interact with it, live it, touch it, maybe even wear it, trying to fill the void formed between the artificial object produced by human and the nature he tries to recreate.

Lukas Hoffmann
Untitled, 2021
MDF dyed through, aluminum sheet painted, 40 x 40 x 40 cm
© Courtesy the artist

01/07/2023