Kontakt

The Invention of the Second Reality

Nina Hoffmann’s “New Portraits”

Rolf Lauter

Kunsthalle Mannheim

With the exhibition “Nina Hoffmann: New Portraits” we would like to present works by an artist who brings the visible and invisible dimensions of the individual and of subjective identity to expression in painting…….Nina Hoffmann is a painter who uses a “direct” pictorial language to achieve a subjective idea of “reality” as well as an approach to the “truth” of an individual in her pictures. I would like to cordially thank Nina Hoffmann for many years of dialog and for her friendly support for the exhibition……..

In our present day, the concept of the image is shaped, on the one hand, by floodlike complexity, and, on the other hand, by a specific intensity that illuminates our ideas of reality from various standpoints. In this context, Nina Hoffmann’s portrait painting is an important position that challenges the viewer to partake of an intense visual experience and that has a long-lasting perceptual-aesthetic effect upon him.

Using a “direct” pictorial language based on elements of intuition and calculation, spontaneity and contemplation, and feeling and intellect, her pictures reveal not only a subjective idea of “reality” but also an approach to an individual’s second reality, hidden behind his visible physiognomic forms. This deeply subjective painting reveals itself to be a reflection of the “inner voice of the soul” and thereby an unfiltered, personal expression that takes the person, his portrait, and humanity as the center of the compositional viewpoint.

“The human being carries the ultimate secrets in his interior, and thus interior is what is most directly accessible to him, so that only here can he hope to find the key to the riddle of the world and to in one thread the being of all things.”

Arthur Schoppenhauer