Layers of the Past, 2025

Vera Hoi  

Vera Hoi is a contemporary artist who approaches landscape as a psychological territory shaped by memory, belonging, transformation, and the search for home.

Forests, lakes, mountains, autumn light, and distant horizons provide the visible framework of her paintings, yet these landscapes rarely remain purely external. Through layering, translucent fields, geometric interruptions, dark passages, and areas of luminosity, Hoi turns nature into a metaphor for the accumulation of lived experience.

For the artist, home is not necessarily a fixed geographical location. It can exist internally, carried through memories, relationships, loss, and the experiences that continue to shape a person regardless of where they live.

This idea is central to The Geometry of Letting Go. Geometric fragments enter natural environments like memories appearing within the present. Some remain sharply defined; others fade, overlap, or become partially obscured. Dark and light layers coexist across the surface, reflecting the way difficult and joyful periods become inseparable parts of a single life.

Autumn holds particular significance in Hoi's work. It represents change without absolute disappearance: leaves fall, colors deepen, the landscape transforms, but life continues in another form.

Based in Austria, Hoi has exhibited internationally across Europe and the United States. Her paintings suggest that letting go does not require forgetting. What has shaped us can remain — altered, integrated, and carried differently — while even the darkest passage eventually gives way to returning light.