HANNOVER.- In the exhibition »Medley Tour by Andy Hope 1930«, from 24 February to 29 April 2012, the kestnergesellschaft is showing new paintings by Andy Hope 1930 (*1963 in Munich, lives in Berlin) in combination with a selection of work from the past four years. Phantoms, superheroes, time machines and “suprematist ghosts” populate the kestnergesellschaft for eight weeks, giving a current overview of Hope’s work.

The self-adopted name of Andy Hope 1930 points to two systems of reference that are important to the artist: Hope associates the year 1930 with both the rise of the comic to a mass medium, or the birth of the superhero, and a premature abandonment of suprematism and Russian constructivism, which Hope revitalizes and continues. In Hope’s art various elements from both systems are related and contrasted to further historical and pop-cultural images worlds.

In his exhibition at the kestnergesellschaft Andy Hope presents his new series of »Medleys«. A medley, among other things, is a piece of music made up of several harmonically adjusted melodies – frequently from a musician’s entire output. Hope has taken a similar approach to his new works, in which he composes and improvises images from elements used in early works (paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures) with the intention of altering the way they are perceived through this “reinterpretation.” In drawing on his own repertoire of images Andy Hope makes new connections between figures, texts, iconographies and colors through which he undertakes a fresh and informal self-revision of his own work. His characteristic playing with time reaches a new high point in the »Medleys«, and it is a connecting element in all the works in the exhibition at the kestnergesellschaft. Alongside Hope’s »Phantoms«, the »Time Tubes«, objects somewhere between painting and sculpture, and the »Espace de Voyage«, a kind of collapsible and thus mobile space, will take the visitor on a journey through time and the artist’s cosmos.

Andy Hope 1930 appeared at the kestnergesellschaft – as Andreas Hofer – in the group exhibitions »Made in Germany« in 2007 and »Back to Black« in 2008. He studied at the Munich Academy of Visual Arts and the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. His works can be found in important international collections, including those of the Lenbachhaus in Munich, the Abteiberg Musueum in Mönchengladbach and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.