PRESS RELEASE
Jeanne Hoffman | Solo Exhibition
Mar 14 – Apr 16, 2025
JEANNE HOFFMAN
14 March - 16 April 2025
In Jeanne Hoffman’s work, fragments of multiple perspectives and memories lend themselves to a collage of many viewpoints, captured, for a moment, by the limits of the canvas and the artist’s particular choices. These material borrowings from disparate realities spill over into one another’s territory, instigating conversations. From one territory moves the unmitigated, primordial, ineffable; from another, the mediated, rationalised, observed – each drawn towards the other in this fertile space of painting.
Hoffman’s process begins with collage and continues through painting; fragments collected and recollected through a series of poetic responses and gestures. At times, references are recognisable; at others, illegible, pre-verbal marks and traces speak of the untamed, of peripheral presences, fugitive fragments hovering in the corner of the eye, burgeoning suggestions on the tip of the tongue. These fragments of experience and sensation make impressions on the unconscious mind and continue materialising on the canvas.
The borrowing of multiple perspectives at once, where distance cohabits with immediacy, is inherent in the very process of artmaking. Meaning is made in the movement between up-close, personal preoccupation and a stepping back, offering a wider angle, but it is movement that simultaneously cloaks and clarifies. Resisting traditional categorisation of abstraction versus figuration, meaning is intimated in the liminal tension, at the moment just before things become certain.
The back and forth continues in the act of exhibiting – of reframing – how and where space opens: between individual pieces; between walls; between artist and viewer; between private and public. Individual and communal spaces become charged with relational meaning as yet unarticulated.
Hoffman’s paintings and exhibitions are, thus, intended as devices for contemplation – what Roland Barthes described as “stages” upon which thoughts roam freely, that permit both artist and viewer to enter into a poetic landscape to engage with what words cannot say, being transformed by the gestures at play, where room is made for recognition, surprise and even refuge.
This is Jeanne Hoffman's first solo exhibition with Everard Read London.
