Thilo Hoffmann
High School Portraits
January 30 to June 5, 2011
CHILL, MANCHILD, and ME AND MANHATTAN are among the expressive titles of the photographs which comprise Thilo Hoffmann’s exhibition High School Portraits, on view at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum from January 30 to June 5, 2011.
The exhibition is an extension of the Swiss artist’s ongoing project, You at your location, at your time, in your world. Compose your own PORTRAIT, whereby he intrudes—politely—into the lives of others. Hoffmann collaborates with his subjects more as an impresario than an artist, enabling participants to realize their dreams through deceptively simple film and photography projects.
For The Aldrich, Hoffmann worked with a group of fourteen local high school students—equally divided between girls and boys—to make a series of photographic “self-portraits,” each 45 by 32 inches, with the results ranging from exuberance to introspection. Hoffmann put the creative impulse behind each portrait and the direction of the photo shoots completely in the hands of the students. His one rule is that the subject must be half the height of the finished photograph, giving maximum significance to the setting.
The artist saw this project as a creative device to help the teens reflect on their position as they emerged from childhood to become young adults. One fact was certain: Hoffmann wanted the students, not their parents, to be the guiding force behind the photographs. This was mainly accomplished by communicating directly with the students via the now ubiquitous, to young adults, medium of texting. As Hoffmann quipped, “Five hundred texts later, we have an exhibition.”
Curator Richard Klein believes that Hoffmann has created a new social contract, rewriting the definitions of portraiture and self-portraiture and of artist and subject. “He inserts himself into the social and organizational dynamic of the chosen group; then, during an intense, but brief, relationship with the group’s individual members, does everything he can to help them realize their ideal expression in a work of art.”
Swiss artist Thilo Hoffmann studied architecture at ETH Zurich, art history at Sotheby’s Educational Department in London, and earned a Master of Arts at Manchester University. Besides being an independent filmmaker, he is involved with curatorial work, lecturing on contemporary art and culture, and teaching seminars on creativity in the corporate world. This range of interests and abilities brings an unusual perspective to his work as an artist, and this point of view has allowed him to consistently blur the boundaries between distinct categories of cultural production.
Thilo Hoffmann, ME AND MANHATTAN,
CAELEY PERRINE/NEW YORK CITY, (detail), 2010
Courtesy of the artist
