Stacks and Wheels

Paul Hofmann: Stacks and Wheels
Constructed Wood Sculpture

When: Tues., March 25 – Sun., May 18, 2008
Where: Lobby and Concourse Galleries
Conversation with the Artist: Friday, March 28, 2:00 pm

My sculptures begin with simple ideas that grow into complicated ones. They take a long time to make and go through many changes. Even after a piece is finished, it is subject to many revisions. Parts or voids tend to number in the thousands. My attention to detail and to structural soundness is obsessive. In these ways I attempt to make objects of great intensity.
My imagery often suggests architecture. There is an element of pattern and ornament, but there is sometimes a dark and disturbing undercurrent, an intrusion of chaos that runs counter to the formal symmetry. A bit of humor is also present, manifesting itself as exaggeration and absurdity.
- Paul Hofmann 

While in residence at the Fresno Art Museum for the installation of his constructed wood sculptures in the Museum's Concourse and Lobby Galleries, Paul Hofmann inadvertently drove past the Fresno Bell Tone Hearing Aids building on First Street. Many years earlier, while a senior at Bakersfield High School, Paul had accompanied his father (who had the Bakersfield Bell Tone franchise) on a trip to the main Fresno office. While waiting for his father, Paul picked up a copy of Time magazine that had a cover and article featuring the work of Henry Moore (1898-1986) along with other contemporary sculptors as Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) and Alexander Calder (1898-1976). Paul knew instinctively that "this is what he wanted to be" even though his earlier artwork had always been about drawing. The following year he enrolled at Oakland's California College of Arts and Crafts to begin a serious study of sculpture - he has never looked back.

Hofmann's sculpture has been informed by his CCAC studies with Elah Hale Hayes, Melvin Moss, Paul Harris and by independent studies and experimentation in both drawing and sculpture following completion of his formal education. His work has appeared in two group exhibitions of Bay Area sculpture at Varnish Fine Art. In 2006, The Oakland Museum of California featured Hofmann's work in a solo exhibition at their City Center Sculpture Court.

What sets Hofmann's sculptural process apart is the building from the bottom up-wards rather than working from a skeletal form. He has commented that his sculptures range from utopian to dystopian in their ultimate conclusions. An earlier work, "Autodidact," 1993 was influenced by impressions from a visit to Arizona's Canyon de Chelly National Monument where the earliest building's stonework was less refined than each succeeding stone dwelling. In Hofmann's work, the bottom layer is also less refined. As each following row is laid the work becomes increasingly perfected until one is struck by the precision of each row of blocks. The more familiar one becomes with each of Hofmann's sculptures, one becomes acutely aware of the mind that visions work of this complexity and ultimate perfection.

Hofmann's sixteen constructed wood sculptures are representative of the work he has completed over the past twenty years. His most recent work, "Deep Time," is geologic in concept with direct reference to the earth's strata. Inspired by a trip to the quarries of Vermont, the wood base suggests layers of time and is constructed of one-hundred-year old mahogany with nickel-plated corners. Interestingly, the mahogany base was unused lumber scorched by San Francisco's 1906 earthquake firestorm. Timber posts placed upon the mahogany base imply great weight, and are pressed downward by stacked beams that have been incised, then filled with acrylic paint and then finely cut by a planer. Each of the beams become complex drawings of incised paths, burrow-like tunnels matched to each succeeding beam - breathtaking in the complexity of its obsessive execution by a master constructionist.