Alfred Hofkunst
Photorealist artist Alfred Hofkunst was born in 1942 in Vienna and died in 2003 in Switzerland, where he spent almost all his life. He did an apprenticeship as a typesetter and a scene painter and then he worked for a short while as a set designer for a theatre in Bern. From the mid-60s, at age 23, he worked as a freelance artist. He was friends with artists such as Bernhard Luginbühl, Jean Tinguely or Niki de Saint-Phalle.
Hofkunst became famous through his realistic drawings of everyday items such as shutters, clothes hangers, lightbulbs and mattresses. Hofkunst visualised what he saw in the world surrounding him according to his philosophy: „the thing as a picture and the picture as a thing“. His drawings, which consist of finely hatched pencil-lines, are not bound to a camera’s perspective. They are not naturalistic, because Hofkunst shows more than we can see by eye. The otherwise inconspicuous objects in his drawings are captured with trompe-l’oeil precision and still, paradoxically, they seem to be more than just images of objects.
One of his most impressive trompe-l’oeil pieces is a lifesize reconstruction of his studio in pencil. Probably his most ambitious project was a study on lake Neuchatel, where he lived in the 70s. He made 30 large-format color drawings of the lake, in sections showing all the different times of the day from midnight to midnight.
Hofkunst never differentiated between fine art and applied design, and he went into product design towards the end of the 80s. From 1987 to 1991 he created the „vegetable watches“ for Swatch. The exceptional Guhrke, Verduhra and Bonjouhr watches caused a sensation and the posters were presented as works of art in Swiss Museums.