Simon Hof

SIMON HOF

The artistic interests of Simon Hof concentrate on ceramic sculpturing utilizing its manifold creation and expressive means.

The theme the artist mainly concentrates on are mostly closed, geometric figures as there are cones, or boxes, like for instance horn-like molded spiral forms, the latter being probed in all their expressive variants. Yet all these do not remain sticked to some naturalistic representation but feature form reducing abstractive alienation effects.

The clay material, while being easily moldable, will reveal inherent material defects after firing or later on when being glazed, thus revealing its unpredictability. Additionally different kinds of clay have to be taken into account, each demanding its own firing procedures, providing various artistic possibilities to work from.

The conjunctive theme independent characteristic of all his works, however, is the appealing interaction of plain and simple basic forms and meticulously designed surfaces. It is the desire to “produce beautiful objects”, as the artist himself calls it, why he especially puts much reflection and time to the outer textures of his works, with the self imposed directive to progressively gain exactness in form and surface design for his sculptures. Preferred motives are stripes, always used with enthralling contrasts to fine grained or long lined craquelures. Those netlike cracks in the glaze, as they are randomly created during firing, are not totally determinable by the artist and might not always produce satisfying results because of their unexpected formations. Stripes as well as craquelures do however appear not with plain geometric objects only but also with the spirals which casually also receive an additional archaic gesture by the application of bulges with irregular punching.

There is nothing static in the oeuvre of Simon Hof but continual attempts to realize the inherent motion in artistic forms irrespective of the given theme. The rigidness of the geometric forms will be broken by skillful selection of cones, truncated cones, seesaws, or sphere halves. This process is exactly reversed in the spiral theme where he tries to settle the inherent motion of the spiral through strict geometrical coloring of its outer appearings.

Dr. Cornelia Vagt-Beck