“The Richard Hofmann Retrospective” Exhibition

Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition

This event has ended.

The Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition presents the very first retrospective of a truly remarkable and significant body of work straight out of the mid-eighties East Village. A ceaseless and prolific painter, the art of Richard Hofmann (b. 1954 – d. 1994) provides an unflinching window onto the tragic world of the young gay artist caught up in the AIDS epidemic which devastated New York just at the time as this unprecedented art scene was blossoming.

A contemporary and personal friend of David Wojnarowicz and many other artists who suffered the same fate, Hofmann’s work is a rare time-capsule of work whose bold colors and iconoclastic themes leap off the canvas perhaps even more today than back then. Surviving 20 years of storage, wrapped and unseen in the cellar of a Brooklyn brownstone basement, a treasure trove of works in colossal sized canvases and mixed media, BWAC is able to bring this passionate and bone-chilling work to light for the first time.

Educated at the Pratt Institute, his style has often been characterized as owing to the school of Neo-Expressionism, but his unique use of distorted figures and a multiplicity of baleful human faces is nowhere to be found except in his own work. One critic noted that Hofmann “tackled the larger questions of sin and redemption, religion and homosexuality, suffering and ecstasy with fervid brushstrokes and layers of intense color.”

Carefully curated as a chronology of his career, this retrospective evokes the heady events of Hofmann’s time: both the ebullient 1980s East Village club years, and the sinister onset of AIDS in the gay community. A member of ACT-UP, his canvases juxtapose religious icons with lurid images of gay men, as he registered his protest against religion’s stance on homosexuality and the public’s denial of the epidemic.

Sensing a tragic ending for himself, his art also served as a means of survival. He continued to experiment with new media outside of oils through the end of his life, adapting his rich layering technique to prints, silkscreens and photomontages, even after his vision became affected in the end by the virus.

This important and powerful retrospective includes over 150 pieces of work from Hofmann’s extensive legacy: large oil paintings, mixed media pieces, watercolors, silkscreens, photomontages, etchings and woodblock prints. Also included are many of his preserved murals which decorated historic 80’s clubs as The Pyramid, Limbo Lounge, Danceteria, The Roxy and The Saint.