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Advertisings - Animals - Childhood - Everyday Life - Miners and Fishermen
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Advertisings |
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 Self-portrait
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Animals |
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In the fifties, Hofbauer started painting the mining and the fishing worlds. Worlds of labour, effort, everyday struggle. But our artist also liked to paint and draw relaxation scenes such as a miner lighting his cigarette or a fisherman playing the flute. These two themes are probably an allusion to his childhood : his father,
a sailor, died when Imre was just a child, and Tatabanya, where
he grew up, was a mining region. |
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These watercolours show forests and clearings, mainly from Hampstead Heath (London), where the green leaves mix with the golden colours of the earth. Most of Imre Hofbauer's landscapes evoke serenity, and the search for calm and escape from the urban life. The opposition between nature, world of freedom, and the city, is amazingly staged in the drawing "Out of the cage", published in "The Other London". |
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Imre Hofbauer started painting nudes in the sixties. He went to the Queen Spad Institute, an art school, to find models and painted them most frequently with oil, and watercolour. |
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"Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter." (Oscar Wilde) |
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Imre Hofbauer's work is generally filled with spirituality, but some topics are clearly religious. Although he was born in a Jewish family, Hof probably received a catholic education in a Hungarian school. He started drawing scenes from the New Testament during World War II. The book Calvary ends with a stunning pencil drawing of the Holly Family named "They, too, were refugees". |
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While trying to understand Hofbauer's work, we soon realize that the city, and everything around it fascinated him. The streets, the corners, the monuments, the shops... This topic is developped in two books : "London, flower of cities all", which focuses on the city itself, and "The Other London" which is an illustrated description of life in the British capital. Beside London, Oxford also interested Imre Hofbauer, and he planned publishing a volume of drawings from Oxford. As this project was never made reality, London remained his main source of inspiration. Considered as a "specialist" of London, he was asked in 1951 to be art editor for "The good time guide to London". |
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To choose the classification by technique, click here
Homepage - Biography and exhibitions - Galleries - His books - Contacts - Guestbook
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