You can almost hear them fizz: The neon and metallic colors on Hanspeter Hofmann’s giant canvases fuse like chemical compounds, creating oscillating streaks, loops, and bubbles. Hofmann’s background in chemistry has been frequently noted, and parallels to scientific practices are obvious in his work. His amoebic formations look like enlarged views of microscopic vistas, and his process itself recalls that of a scientist: In the search for new images, he experiments on his own oeuvre, zooming in on tiny details of previous works and blowing them up to XXL proportions. In his recent paintings, buzzwords borrowed from pornography or sports, stenciled skulls, or adhesive black birds—the kind sometimes applied to the windows of public buildings—are inserted into the compositions, emphasizing the flatness of the picture plane and making it clear that a visual lexicon derived only from science doesn’t do it for Hofmann anymore. An oversize, glittering decal parrot might even be a joking wink at art-historical iconography. And snakes—rendered in a hypernaturalistic airbrush technique—have suddenly emerged from the artist’s trademark abstract knotted forms, as if to leave no doubt that these paintings are dangerous.
