Alekos Hofstetter

In his drawings of the work cycle TANNHÄUSER TOR, Alekos Hofstetter transforms buildings of post-war modernism into utopian

cult sites. This newly created pictorial world with its brutalist new buildings and conversions has nothing in common with nostalgia, and even the pseudo-romantic landscapes created by the artist are probably more of a clever feint. The fantastic transplantation of modernist buildings into landscapes in which one would probably rather assume castles, which is often carried out in the drawings, makes it visible to the viewer that such a decontextualization makes a re-evaluation possible. Concrete. It all depends on what you make of it. Paradoxically, Alekos Hofstetter reclaims by means of decontextualization what had slipped into the distance and analytically clearly makes an important artistic contribution to the long overdue social-aesthetic discourse on the desolation that the progressive displacement of modernity entails.

ALEKOS HOFSTETTER (*1967, Bonn) and grew up in Brussels and Bangkok. He lives and works in Berlin since 1996. Together with the artists Christian Steuer and Daniel H. Wild, he founded the artist collective BEWEGUNG NURR in 1989 in Dresden. Hofstetter participated in numerous international exhibitions including Goethe-Institut Toronto, the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst (NGBK), Berlin, Ideal-Passage, Berlin, GLUE, Berlin, Galerie Lisi Hämmerle, Bregenz, Laura Mars Gallery, Berlin and received various grants from Stiftung Kulturfonds, Berlin, Stiftung F.AIM, Den Haag, Else Heiliger Fonds, Berlin, Stiftung Dr. Robert und Lina Thyll-Dürr, Elba, Künstlerhaus Lukas, Ahrenshoop, the Stanglerhof Residency, Bolzano. Together with the Berlin stage designer Nina von Mechow, he worked on the stage design of various theatre projects, including Strasbourg Opera House Opéra national du Rhin, plays by George Tabori at the Theater in der Josefstadt, Vienna, and for René Pollesch at the Deutsches Theater Berlin.