Flemming Hoff

Oil painter and digital artist Flemming Hoff constructs moody, monochromatic cityscapes eerily stripped of streets and activity. Adding floating architectural details to the abstracted geometrics developed in his oil works, Hoff evolves a surreal isolating ambience not unlike Giorgio de Chirico's unsettling urban scenes. The staggered arrangement of forbidding vertical buildings and horizontal moonscapes of billowing grays testifies to the Danish artist's architectural training, a formal understanding of relations between structures and empty space.

Aside from hanging buildings uneasily on the edge of abstraction, Hoff's digital visions are deeply existential. They offer uncanny views onto a stylized version of contemporary existence where life is spent watching the world at a safe remove through windows and screens. Hoff's characters observe expansive gray landscapes from their starkly rectangular towers, with a mix of fear and longing. The lasting effect in Hoff's works is acute alienation, a vision of lives in close proximity but emotionally distant, perched over the shifting sands of the desert of the unreal.