Martin Höfer

Höfer was born in Sondershausen, the son of the German writer Gerald Höfer and the therapist Ute Höfer, and spent his childhood in Sondershausen and Bendeleben near the Kyffhäuser. He came into contact with art at a very early age, particularly through his father's cultural commitment. In the mid-1980s, for example, Gerald Höfer organized the event series Das Café Pille Experiment in Sondershausen with readings, cabaret, performances and exhibitions.[1][2] From 1999 to 2003 Martin Höfer attended the Walter Gropius School of Art and Design in Erfurt with Dr. Ulrike Hess, where, following ideas from the Bauhaus preliminary course of Johannes Itten, Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy, he learned constructive and structural compositional exercises.[3]

In the late 1990s Höfer began his artistic design practice. In 1998 the father-son artist group Barbara Rossa was founded with multimedia readings and speech performances.[4] In 1999, he began vocational training as a media designer for digital and print media, specializing in media design for digital media, with Dr. Peter Roskothen and Andreas Fack, which he completed in 2002 with excellent results. In 2002 and 2004, together with his father, he founded first the ARTE FAKT publishing house and later the ARTE FAKT gallery. In their context, various artistic-cultural events such as exhibitions and readings, festivals and film screenings took place.[5] In addition, he published several publications.[6] To reflect this change, the word art came more to the fore in his artistic media design. In 2005, together with the museum educator of the Panorama Museum Michael Wollenheit, he organized his first major solo exhibition Multimedial Universal Poetry.[7]

In 2005 he began studying media art at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, first with Christin Lahr[8] and from 2007 with Günther Selichar.[9][10] Günther Selichar's class for Mass Media Research and Art in Media Public Space, newly founded in 2007, was of central importance for his artistic work.[11][12] In the years that followed, he had various guest residencies with Lei Cox and Steven Dixon at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design in Norway, with Hashem El-Ayoubi at Helwan University Cairo, Egypt,[13] with Ramiz Sabbagh at Al-Balqa Applied University Amman, Jordan,[14] and with Henrik B. Andersen at Vilniaus dailės akademija, Lithuania.[15] In 2013, he graduated with a degree in Fine Arts with distinction. In 2015, he received a six-month Artist in Residence grant funded by the Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen to participate in the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York.[16]

In 2010 he created his artistic work Siegen im Auftrag der Kunst (Victory on behalf of art), which was performed (in mass media) in 2012/13. The conceptual artwork turns art patronage on its head, in which the artist himself becomes the client for a racing team.[17] The focus is on the mass media reproduction of the performance and collaterals, associated artworks created by or related to the performance.[18][19]From 2014 to 2018, EISKANAL / Citius, Altius, Fortius. was created as an artistic intervention in the German national bobsled team.[20] In 2016, he intervened with his work BEST BUY ME / NO. 10 in the advertising rotation of the basketball Bundesliga game Science City Jena against Alba Berlin.[21][22][23] In the same year, he staged a participatory performance with 7.500 fans in the Allianz Arena during the Bundesliga soccer match FC Bayern Munich against RB Leipzig.[24] In the exhibition Mythos Tour de France at the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf to mark the start of the 2017 Tour de France in Düsseldorf, Höfer was the youngest and most critical artist alongside Andreas Gursky, Robert Capa, Reinhard Mucha and Kraftwerk with his work The surplus self of mine promotes my triumph (Eigenblutdoping).[25] In 2018, he received a European Union grant from the Thuringian Ministry of Economics at ThEX for innovation-based projects[26] and was nominated for the ThEx Award in the category Idea holders in 2019.[27] Also in 2019, Höfer was artistic director of ANHYDRITE — Biennale of Media Art.[28] In 2019 he founded the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der künstlerischen Avantgarde mbH, in 2020 he was a member of the founding board of the BDS Akademie e.V., and in 2021 he conceived the ART 2 INNOVATION network at the Zentrum für Produkt, Verfahrens- und Prozessinnovation GmbH (ZVPV) in the Experimental Factory Magdeburg.

Höfer lives and works in Leipzig.

The role of the artist in a subsystem of public space remote from art is specifically explored in the multi-year action EISKANAL/Citius, Altius, Fortius. by Martin Höfer. At the New York ISCP, he developed the concept of the large-scale mass-media conceptual artwork. In his capacity as an artist, Höfer was integrated into the coaching staff of the German national bobsled team for over four years. The complete integration of an artist into a national team in an Olympic discipline was a first in the history of conceptual art.[44] He accompanied the national team to competitions, during training, to other activities and even into the athletes' private surroundings. He became an integral part of the 40-member team. Even more than in other works, the accreditation and acceptance of the artist as a member of the team is central to the "EISKANAL" campaign. Höfer's presence in all areas of the athlete's daily life becomes the decisive element of this conceptual work, which can thus be described primarily as a kind of performance art. Höfer's special interest is the reaction of the environment and the interaction of the same with the artist. The exciting thing about the artistic work is that it deals very consciously with systems and brings these systems into an interaction with each other. [...] We often think there is the system of sports, there is the system of the economy, there is the system of art. And it becomes exciting when artists like Martin Höfer begin to sit precisely at the interfaces of these worlds and weave these systems absolutely into one another.[45]

The resulting photographic works see themselves less as an artistic product and more as a characterizing action.[46][47] For the acceptance on the part of the athletes and their supervisors, an artistic action familiar to them was of importance. Since the presence of the artist is at the same time the decisive aspect of the work, the epithet of the work "Citius, Altius, Fortius" - "Faster, Higher, Further" - that corresponds to the motto of the Olympic Games, is also understood as a conscious and ironic contrast to the better known unofficial motto "Being there is everything. For "being there" is 'everything' for Höfer's artistic intervention.[48] Höfer associates the term "collaterals" with objects of his actions such as yellow jackets of the official team clothing of the national team during the World Cup competitions between the Olympic Games in Sochi and Pyongchang. The jackets were worn by the artist himself. And also shoes or helmets of the German anglers, following the practice of iconic presentation of garments within the cult of personality around successful athletes or other celebrities, these objects are representative of special moments, recall the competitions and are most closely associated with their original owners, the successful athletes. The name "collaterals" can be translated both as "pledge" in the sense of "accompanying element" and as "security". In a sense, they are artifacts or relics of past art performances, which, as gifts from the athletes, also testify to the artist's close relationship with them.[49]

Mythos Tour de France, Exhibition at NRW-Forum Düsseldorf in May 2017

At the NRW Forum, artist Martin Höfer had nailed a bag of his own blood to an oversized and alienated newspaper page of L'Equipe for the start of the Tour de France in Düsseldorf. An issue from July 1998: in it the doping scandal at the Festina team. All other works in the exhibition Mythos Tour de France,[50] however, showed the fascination that the artists have for the bicycle race.[51]

Media Art Car at Norisring 2012

In early 2012, Höfer created a new dimension of art in public space with his large-scale work Siegen im Auftrag der Kunst (Victory on behalf of art).[52] Höfer's work Siegen im Auftrag der Kunst (Victory on behalf of art) der Kunst was supported by three pillars. The first pillar consisted of the shift in commissioning as a crucial basic idea.[53] Whereas it was previously common for an artist to be commissioned to create an art car, Höfer took the opposite approach with Siegen im Auftrag der Kunst, commissioning a professional racing team himself to compete for victory on behalf of art in the 2012 Porsche Carrera Cup. The Porsche 911 GT3 Cup designed by Höfer not only completed a single race, but also took part in the Porsche Carrera Cup Deutschland throughout the 2012 season as part of the DTM. The media art car was piloted by Christina Nielsen, who competed for the Farnbacher Racing team. While the main focus of previous Art Cars was on the design of the car, for the artist the focus was on how the media handled the artistic concept. Far from the brute force, however, Martin Höfer's work is also of social relevance. For years he has been using the marketing potential of the racing circus for his idea.[54] During a performance phase, he tried to fathom how attention is created and maintained by the media in order to create, in a productive process, individual works of art for exhibitions in a museum environment that are aligned with the overall concept using artistic means such as design, color composition, photography, videos, installations, and others. For this it was indispensable for him as an artist to penetrate parasitically into sports and mass media, which was the second pillar of this work. The resulting media output then in turn became the basis for further individual artworks. Finally, the third aspect lay in leaving the traditional museum space during the performance phase and entering such public spaces, which are entered consciously and with a positive expectation by the potential viewer of the work. The artist himself calls this the euphorized space.[55] Here we can find an essential difference to traditional square or street art. It is about "confronting" the viewer with art in such places where he normally does not expect it. The euphoria of the fans at sporting events generates per se a higher sensitization and attention for that which at first seems like a disruptor in the overall concept of the event. The individual artworks created during the performance phase can be assigned to four different artistic concepts - Embedded Artist, Embedded Media Production, Collaterals and Merchandise Cycle.[56]

CAPITAL UNEMPLOYED at the National Gallery in Vilnius

Höfer's work CAPITAL UNEMPLOYED is an appropriation of the collection's inventory catalog from the Lithuanian National Gallery in Vilnius.[57] The two outer e-billboards randomly and simultaneously displayed the information from the database, of which the artistic works were not in a public exhibition at the time of the presentation, but whose condition was marked as 'stored'. In his presentation, Höfer deliberately dispensed with the visual material available in the database and concentrated the view on the pure textual level.

Through the chosen presentation of the work and the artistic intervention, he not only addresses the question of presence and absence, but also takes up a contemporary discourse between private and public collections, in which the accumulation of collected but not exhibited works is purposefully listed as dead capital.[58]

BEST BUY ME / NO. 02, Billboard in public space during the exhibition On (plein) Air, Dresden 2009

The first work in the BEST BUY ME was created in 2008.[59] Since then, Höfer has developed various BEST BUY ME works for different themes in different formats, depending on the exhibition venue in the poster tension frame, as a billboard, facade banner. 2012 for BUY ME / NO. 08 he used advertising space of a race car,[60] which drove at the Rally Monte Carlo to the end. In 2016 he intervened for the first time in the mass media with the work BUY ME / NO. 10 on a digital billboard during the Basketball Bundesliga (BBL) game between Science City Jena and Alba Berlin.[61] Characteristic of each of the works are color stripes on which is written in the artist's handwriting best buy me. The lettering becomes almost completely illegible in the interplay with the stripes. Höfer takes the color combination for his best buy me works from the context he is dealing with in the respective work. It is always a matter of economic entanglements, business areas that are not apparent or insignificant to the outsider at first glance. Upon closer examination, however, it becomes apparent that these are often just cover-up tactics. He alludes to this through the illegibility of the provocative lettering (Buy me as cheaply as possible) and additionally exaggerates it through the irritating stripes in glossy advertising aesthetics.

Martin Höfer Bannkreis Harmagedon, Multimedia performance, Lichtreigen-Festival, „Altes Gut“ Burgau, Jena 2004

Barbara Rossa is a multimedia literary project by Gerald and Martin Höfer.[62] It was founded in 1998. The experimental linking of varieties of literature, music, visual arts and the work with different digital media gave both of them the idea to combine all these genres and to lead them to an impressive overall experience.[63] The aim of the project is to present literary texts in multimedia form and at performances.[64] Between 1999 and 2005, Barbara Rossa published numerous books, recordings, videos and sampler contributions:

Books:

• „Schwarze Monologe“, 1999.
• „Sophie“, 2002.
• „Gedichte zwischen mir nichts und dir nichts“, 2003.

Samplerbeiträge:

• „Belphegor“, Textsoundcollage. Künstler zum 12. Wave Gotik Treffen. 2002.
• „bloß“, Textsoundcollage. Samplerbeitrag auf Flammenzauber III, 2003.

Video:

• „Bannkreis Harmagedon – Live in Jena“, 2005.

Performances:

• „Schwarze Monologe“
• „Bekenne!“
• „Die Kassette“
• „Sophie“

The publishing house was initially founded to publish the multimedia works of Barbara Rossa. Later, other artists were also published under this label. Höfer was responsible for series layout and illustration, for which he used his own previous works. The orientation to elevate art to the level of mass media is already clearly recognizable here. His graphic series "Schattendasein," which illustrated "Gedichte zwischen mir nichts und dir nichts" ("Poems between me nothing and you nothing"), was awarded the Cross-Category Art Prize of the Universities of Halle, Leipzig and Jena in 2005. Illustrations by him can be found in the following publications, among others:

• Barbara Rossa: „Sophie“, 2002.
• Barbara Rossa:„Gedichte zwischen mir nichts und dir nichts“, 2003.
• Oswald Henke: FSK 18, 2003.
• Norbert K. Engelhardt: Schön im letzten Augenblick, 2004.
• Chris Goellnitz: Gene im Blutlicht, 2005.
• Gerald Höfer & Michael Brust (Hrsg.): Tief im Schoße des Kyffhäusers, 2005.
• Norbert K. Engelhardt: eWigkeit, 2015.

The Artefakt Gallery was opened in 2005 and pursues the goal of presenting modern art in rural areas. The exhibition Multimediale Universalpoesie in 2005 showed, among other things, original works by Höfer used in the publications of Artefakt Verlagsanstalt.