Happy House
8 – 24 May 2025
Solo Show
Karine Hoffman
Galerie Ars Longa
Exhibition organized as part of the 17th Printemps de l’art contemporain Festival with the Provence Art Contemporain network – May 2 to 18, 2025. Aix tour Saturday, May 10, 2025 – Guided tour of the Ars Longa Gallery 4:30 pm in the presence of artist Karine Hoffman.
“This is the happy house / We’re happy here in the happy house” sang Siouxsie and the Banshees in 1980. Like the sounds of this satyrical melody, Karine Hoffman’s works are a sensitive space, using irony and dreamlike imagery to evoke intrinsically personal subjects: consciousness, the passage of time, finitude and the impossibility of hiding from oneself.
“In the beginning, there was the glove found in “How are you Banana” or the armchair in “Attrapait les étoiles”. These empty human objects composed and punctuated pictorial scenographic spaces questioning passage, absence and time, appealing to the memory of a past moment or perhaps an existing future. More recently, figures have been appearing in fragmented form: eyes that look at us, calling out to us like a summons. Bodies that haunt landscapes like apparitions. The presence of these bodies is epiphanic in the sense that they carry within them the enigma of all bodies, of all humanity. Karine Hoffman’s painting is a painting of revelation. Like a large filter, the canvas captures the vibrations of the world. The painter’s “painted gesture” brings to the surface the dross of contemporary archaeology. These figures and bodies are anonymous. It is this anonymity that makes them universal.
viewing room
