George Hofmann’s career began in New York City in the 1950s. His ethos remains strongly inspired by the substance of that period, and engages the potential of the gestural tradition as a catalyst in transforming the human spirit. Hofmann’s new paintings on view at Show Room navigate metaphorical abstract space by means of expressive processes that metonymically recall passage from the Byzantine to the Renaissance. As the artist observes:

“The world is awash in visual information; unedited and torrential, pixellated, flickering, backlit, and instantaneous. The space we’ve known in painting is giving way to that which hints at depth, subtly suggesting it, opening pictures and giving us surfaces that invite us in. For those thinking about it, it’s exhilarating, and exciting to imagine the possibilities open to us.” *

A former instructor at Hunter College, where he was colleagues with Ralph Humphrey, Vincent Longo, and Ray Parker, Hofmann’s work has been shown here and abroad since 1970. In 2009, a solo exhibition at the Martinez Gallery in Troy included more than fifty years of the artist’s production in painting, drawing, and graphics. He is represented in the collections of the Albany Institute of History and Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Boston Public Library, as well as numerous corporate collections. Hofmann’s work was recently seen in the multimedia exhibition www.after-duccio.com at Ventana 244 in Brooklyn.

George Hofmann lives and works in Washington, DC and Troy, NY. This is the artist’s first exhibition with Show Room.

• “Notes on Fractured Space”, http://paulcorio.blogspot.com/2010/11/george-hofmann-on-fractured-space.html