Alfred Hofkunst was born in Vienna in 1942. In 1948 he moved to Zurich with his family. He did an apprenticeship as typesetter and theater painter, later he worked as a stage designer at the Stadttheater in Bern. From 1965 he was a freelance artist and became internationally known for his realistic drawings. In 2004 he dies in Cudrefin.

Each stage of his art was surprising and new – after the first literary etchings he devoted himself to drawn objects of his environment; Rolling shutters, windows, garden fences, carpets, fishing rods, light bulbs and flies, and the legendary mattress now hanging in the Stedeliijk Museum in Amsterdam. He worked with the tip of a pencil or color pen, which he slid over the paper in a hating way. He dismantled the subject into a dense fabric of gossamer strokes and at the same time immersed his imagery in a magical light.

At Documenta 6, Hofi (as he was called, though he was almost two meters tall and wearing shoe number 46) caused a sensation with the drawing of his studio in original size (300 x 620 x 740 cm). Later, he dealt with nature. The forests and meadows, the blue sky, the four seasons and then the presumptuous idea of representing the waters of Lake Neuchâtel from early morning to late evening. He made it with a huge barge and 32 screens of 4 square meters each. Water continued to fascinate him – in Marseilles, the ship’s reflections and the surf.
Seafood, plants and flowers inspired Hofi to produce huge prints. These were so big that a new method for printing had to be invented. Hofi replaced the printing block with a steam roller weighing several tons. It took 5 employees to produce a print. Every print was unique.
In the 1980s he studied the human figure, capturing only parts of the female body. These works are deliberately fragmented and torso-staged.

Alfred Hokunst’s work is characterized by superlatives. He was the boss of the giants, and that’s what he craved. His studio was huge (the one in the port of Marseille was the size of a football field), the canvases gigantic, the claims enormous. He always wanted more – and finally landed with himself, with himself, with his image, and with his works. In the end, all was retreat and escapism: cannibalistic self-destruction of a genius called Alfred Hofkunst and called Hofi.

The Galerie Bernhard Bischoff & Partner is pleased to show works from five decades from the private collection of Eva and Willi Ebinger. The couple and their family have been close friends with Alfred Hofkunst for over 40 years and have accompanied him on his life’s journey, in his creative phases and often on his exclusive excursions.