Clusterfkk

2018

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After returning from NYC mid-2020, Hoffie began a series of large scale oil-on-canvases extending the ideas of the ‘epic’ that characterised her Clusterfkk series of large works on transparent paper that she’d worked on between 2017 – 2019. These works, collectively titled I will tell you almost nothing, drew from both personal references and art history to reflect on the events of the time.

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‘Hoffie’s new body of work includes both domestic & larger scale oil paintings on canvas & paper created since 2019. Here, figures both recognisable & imagined, float in fanciful landscapes, teasing the viewer’s curiosity. These works reflect the chaotic state-of-play in the world since (& before) the impact of the global pandemic. Drawing from epic themes addressed in art history & literature, Hoffie used her isolation to try to make sense of her “fractured, ruptured world view”. Her return to studio painting was “motivated by the necessity of seclusion, & by the sense that painting offers a way of silently trying to make some kind of provisional sense of the chaos & confusion of the world around her”. This exhibition gives a glimpse of some of the works undertaken over two years including a raft of smaller images that continue the focus on the “improbable, the impossible, the incomprehensible, & those small glimmers of light in between”.’

 

More info at: https://www.fireworksgallery.com.au/exhibition/pat-hoffie-i-will-tell-you-almost-nothing

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In these works, topics that include the global pandemic, the chaos and confusion of socially mediated experiences, the cataclysmic impacts of cause and effect are often interwoven with references to classical literature. References to Henry Darger’s (1892 – 1973) ‘Vivian Girls ‘populate apocalyptic dreamscapes where history, the present and the future intersect.