Andy Hope 1930: Black Fat Fury Road

In his exhibition “Black Fat Fury Road” at Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Andy Hope 1930 (the alter ego of Andreas Hofer) tests the limits of iconic and emblematic signs. Mobilising their possibilities, perceptual models, and incompatibilities, by appropriating a “monster” icon, for instance, the certainties of language and the conventions of painting are rendered utterly unstable. Hope also brings simple markings to virtually monochrome black enamel paintings, mingling the impression of hermetic elegance with the discomfiture of a defunct industrial product, putting automotive paint to canvas with Hope’s own handcrafted “manufacturing” defects.

These new works continue to operate in the language of the circulating negative that Hope first presented with his “UNappropriated Activities” in 2015. What he evoked with the loudly all-caps prefix “UN” back then is now accentuated with elements of drawing that are no less complex: two conical red forms at the “head” of the plane, identified as devil’s horns or eyes by the field of emotional communication, create a narrative and associative space that actively foments the certainties of the concept of the work of art, contaminating it with toxic values: pure abstraction or dirt, sublime modernity or phantom dross.