HILARIUS HOFSTEDE
New Drawings
16 Oct – 18 Dec 2015
TMH is pleased to announce its fall program opening October 16, 2015: New Drawings of the Dutch multimedia artist HILARIUS HOFSTEDE presented against the background of Art & Project’s Bulletins 1-156, 1968-1989.
Hofstede soaked up the expressions of the Dutch conceptual avant-garde in the 1970s by practically living with the Collectie Becht assembled by Art & Project’s major clients Frits and Agnes Becht. To make use of this consciousness, he traveled to Paris to attend the Ecole Supérieure de Cinéastes and soon turned to language and music. From 1996 onwards, under his funk moniker Paleo Psycho Pop, Hofstede conjured up a luminous personal response to the postmodern in his writings and assemblages.
PUBLICATION
TMH Catalogue 3.1, 2015
MUSIC
Mostly Mompou with pianist Marjes Benoist, 16 Nov 2015
Download Press Release
It was Hofstede’s glorious renderings of primal and animal forms that anchored his collaborative installations—from Polynesian Instant Geography at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1999 and in 2012 at the Musée de la Chasse in Paris to the recent traveling Bison Caravan. Masterfully collaged, pastiched, bricolaged, and inscribed on ragged paper, these drawings gained early acclaim and landed in major museums and private collections.
Behind the visual polysemy of individual works lies, but like a trauma that must be repressed, Hofstede’s uneasy relation to a postmodernist art with its back turned to nature and origins. Viewed in dialogue with Art & Project’s exhibition history, his new series powerfully affirms this play of difference.
BIOGRAPHY
Hilarius Hofstede (1965, NL) is an unparalleled innovator and versatile interpreter of the conjunctions of nature and culture, working with paper, assemblages, texts, and music. His seminal works are in many public and private collections. He has recently composed the lyrics for the album Mastervolt by the New York band Defunkt and is the author of the cult books De Markies van Water (1999), Microsoft Mon Amour (2017), and Pop Killer (2021). Hofstede’s museum-wide collaborative interventions were seen at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, 1999, the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, 2003, and the Musée de la Chasse in Paris, 2012. He is the founder and mastermind of the traveling festival the Bison Caravan.
