Andreas Hofer's disturbing and challenging imagery is derived from history, art history, and popular culture, but is definitively his own. His subject matter includes the symbols of the Third Reich, comic book heroes and science fiction. Hofer builds up a complex and diverse system of signs, removing traditional symbols from the popular lexicon and distorting them to present provocative and subversive parallels. Signing his works with the alter ego "Andy Hope" and the date "1930", Andreas Hofer simultaneously invokes an all-American optimism and a dark era of European history. He is particularly inspired by the 1930s, the decade that witnessed Germany's transition from the Weimar Republic to National Socialism, from democracy to totalitarianism, but was also marked by the development of film as the most powerful new tool of mass communication. Fascinated by Nazi approved art, he confronts it with signs of modernism, comic strip and film in order to interrogate its charismatic power and superficiality.
Hofer works in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, drawing, and collage, building up complex installations with many layers of meaning. This book, published on the occasion of Hofer's exhibition 'This Island Earth' at Hauser & With London in Spring 2006, contains colour reproductions of numerous new works, including a thirty-six foot long painting realised for the exhibition, alongside new sculptures and banners and a group of smaller paintings. Other recent paintings, drawings, and collage works are also reproduced.
