Wetterstrasse, Herdecke (diptych) Gelatin silver prints, 123 x 76,5 cm - 2012
LUKAS HOFFMANN
Born in Zoug, Switzerland. 1981.
Lives and works in Berlin.
“As the very earth upsets the surface of the image, the picture loses the depth of the landscape.”
In Lukas Hoffmann’s photographs, the landscape does not stretch out before a horizon at the back of the image ; it splays the front view of its surface. Instead of a horizon you see thick brush, a mirror-like pond, wilted leaves, the earth of a ploughed field.
The pictural field moves along the ground, erasing the coordinates of the horizon which is the line that usually differentiates the sky from the earth, what is close from what is far, by structuring man’s orientation in space through balance and gravity. Hoffmann’s photographs deprive the spectator of this possibility of differentiating and distancing. A new organization of the landscape takes form in these images of wilting radicchio fields.
BIOGRAPHY
Lukas Hoffmann was born in 1981 in Zoug, Switzerland. From 2003 to 2007, he studied plastic arts at the National Higher School of Fine Arts (École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts) in Paris before taking part in the La Seine research project (ENSBA, Paris) from 2009 to 2011. Workshop scholarships took him to Antwerp (2008/2009), Berlin (2011) and New York (Foundation UBS – 2016). His photographs are regularly displayed in personal and group exhibits. They are among prestigious collections such as that of the Neuflize Vie and the Hermès Foundation. He is currently living in Berlin.
Photo: Courtesy of the artist