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Ruan Hoffmann at iArt Gallery Wembley: A Project Room for Contemporary Art
Ruan Hoffmann as featured in ZAM Africa magazine. Copyright ZAM
iArt Gallery Wembley: A Project Room for Contemporary Art presents from 3rd March 2011 till 29th March 2011 the new ceramics of Ruan Hoffmann. The artist will be showing 100 new ceramic pieces made in the last quarter of 2010 since his return from Amsterdam in the Netherlands where he was resident at the Thami Mnyele Foundation. The pieces feature a combination of hand painted images and transfers from cell phone photographs taken by the artist.
Hoffmann’s imagery and fragments of metaphor are the expression of his personal life experiences. Tapping into crisp moments of sincerity, these fleeting insights are complemented by the honesty of the medium in which he chooses to work.
This series emerged directly out of the artist’s residency in Amsterdam and events during his stay in that city. For instance, featured in the work are the 2010 eruptions of Eyafjallajokull in Iceland which, although relatively small, caused enormous disruption to air travel across western and northern Europe. For the artist, the significant power of this random event, which brought air traffic to a standstill, allowed for a hard, clear realisation of deterministic systems – a philosophical doctrine that is particularly relevant in these times.
All the artwork was made in paper clay (sometimes referred to as fibre clay), with Hoffmann using earthenware clay as his base to which he added processed celluloid fibre. The objects have then been covered in porcelain slip and decorated in various techniques ranging from metallic lustres and glass to hand painted images and photographic transfers.
