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.
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.
