Biography

Andy Hope 1930, formerly known as Andreas Hofer, adopted his name in 2010, though his work has been signed this way from the beginning of his career. The artist associates the year 1930 with a historic caesura, a turning point in the development of the historical avant-garde that faced onto a series of social, political and artistic crises in European modernity. Hope uses ‘1930’ as a portal to assume the role of time-traveller, pursuing and projecting a persona of alien modernity. He works in various media such as painting, drawing, sculpture and film, arranging his works in innovative installations, turning received styles, periodizations and categories on their heads. His exhibitions result in creating a uniquely complex iconography that draws on high and popular cultures, literary and aesthetic tropes as well as self and social constructions. Hope enlists motifs from cosmic phenomena, traditions of self-portraiture and superhero fiction to explore the collective delusions and existential defaults of contemporary society. He questions the debilitating consequences arising from the decline of social life through the demands of self-optimisation, confronting disguise and cover-up with outbursts of irritation and concessions to failure. Hope’s fictional universe moves between the debris of history, fantastic utopian ideas and new morphological projections, creating what he refers to as ‘a mazy infinity’.