Painting, Collage and Light Object

After a long break – Marc von der Hocht had with Artefact Affairs his last solo exhibition in 2018 in the gallery – the artist presents new works, which he could start only recently after serious illness.
The long break, especially in the visual-artistic work, suddenly made me understand his already considerable volume of work as very limited. After all, I could in recent years use in communication and corona owed limited exhibition operation only the created volume up to and including 2018. No new work was in sight. There are simply three years missing in his paintings, his collages and his (wall and light) assemblages. It was not even clear whether he would continue as a visual artist.

The title of his exhibition is program: Drift
drift - stands, among other things, for drifting, letting drift, in the figurative sense: letting happen. The word could stand for an attitude, observing and experimenting, which implies an openness that leaves room for the impulses of creativity, without necessarily directing them in a goal-oriented way, pushing them in a new direction. Letting happen and starting where the artist left off in 2018. To orientate oneself, to reassure oneself, to first start again with the knowledge and experiences that already exist. And these are - this can be observed precisely in his work since 2012 at the latest - manifold. They are based on the sensitivity in the experience of the (Berlin urban) reality surrounding us and its artistic implementation in painting, collage, sculptures/objects and light objects.

The speed of a city, the merging of urban spaces, details defining them such as house facades, cars whizzing by, neon and traffic signs, etc. in the field of tension of sharp-edged lines and shimmering blurriness leave Marc von der Hocht daily as an enthusiastic, the city-permeating, cyclist, whizzing by color and line spaces as an impression. This is accompanied and reinforced by the visual and acoustic presence of analog and digital glossy communication, which communicates our world, among other things, in (smooth) design staccato. The lively and colorful club culture with its beat and sound has also left its mark. 

The exhibitions Abol Tabol (2013), Corpus Delicti (2014), Akasha (2015), LOCKHEED (2017) and Artefact Affairs (2018) are testimony to this. They have conditioned a sovereignty in his abstract painting that, once seen, remains in the memory. Marc von der Hocht has become a color master who creates countless seemingly constructive color spaces in one painting with flair and intelligence, allowing them to relate to each other, against and with each other, without losing sight of the big picture and the whole, which, however, can only be summed up in the creative process itself. Each color space, sometimes precisely captured, sometimes shimmering into others, bounded by energetic archetypal constructs reminiscent of machine details, docked to them, infiltrated or blended, all these pictorial details evoke a next step in the work when they are set, until harmony has set in, the picture is 'round' in its balance. Concentrated energy, color dynamics with small explosive fires and the large directional forces that bundle directions of view through the tectonic frameworks in the pictorial space now 'float' in a harmony, in a ground state that has found the balance between its breaking apart and its static calm. The multiple color spaces cannot be defined as a front and a back, even if the color perspective may suggest that, the color space boundaries become too ambiguous among themselves. Nevertheless, an image full of dynamics into the vastness of infinite space is suggested.

Recently, the artist was presented as a worthy representative of young painting in Germany in the opulent book DISSONANCE by Marc Gisbourne and Christoph Tannert (published by DCV) and the two-part exhibition generated from it at Künstlerhaus Bethanien. The exhibition, in which his large fascinating painting Contura can be seen, runs until September 11.

The exhibition Drift will show how seemingly effortlessly Marc von der Hocht picks up where he left off in 2018. It will be similar with his image and light objects, the materialization of which I could also only experience - albeit promisingly - from my own perspective during my studio visit in the state of work in progress in July.

Welcome back, lieber Marc!

Berlin August 2022

Drift

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