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Andy Hope 1930
AH 1930 in Nice, 2013
Lightfast Marker on paper
21 x 29.7 cm
Berlin-based artist Andy Hope helps himself to the various resources of art history and popular culture, especially to the Russian avant-garde as well as to American comics. He hereby creates an art that is both astonishingly present-day as well as visionary, art that attempts to dissipate the space-time continuum and cultivates the theory of a multiverse.
The artist sees himself in the role of a time traveler with shifting identities. Formally, his paintings and drawings recall cover titles and posters that however here do not relate to a specific reality. Rather with the aesthetic principle that uses known patterns and picture captions, Hope is aspiring to a utopian space in which new scenarios are proclaimed and can take place.
In his current series of drawings, Andy Hope is markedly alluding to Matisse. He has appropriated the Frenchman’s cursory contour-style and bright colors. It is the Fauve artist’s bold and emblematic late work and his papercuts that have especially inspired Hope, since he sees in them a close link to the comic style that he himself so prizes as a genre. As in earlier works, he also hints as his new “role” in his signature, to which he this time adds “in Nice”. Namely, the place where Henri Matisse spent almost his entire life, because he so loved the southern light. Henri Matisse has thus become another alter ego within Andy Hope’s “imaginary collaborations”. For Province, Andy Hope 1930 chose from his current drawings a first motif for a large-scale graphic print. It shows the portrait of a man in profile, surrounded by flowers, tendrils and decorative vases. Whether this figure is Batman’s right-hand man Robin, Arthur Rimbaud or even the young Matisse is all in the eye of the beholder. The artist has done it once again; he’s created another hybrid identity.
