Margo Hoff at Bill Bace - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Margo Hoff's novel exhibition was a mini-retrospective of sorts, covering about 20 years' work. The artist, who is now in her 80 studied in Chicago in the 1930 and first achieved prominence there, then settl in novel York in the early 1960s

Hoff's works are canvas collages. She begins by means of applying several coats of acrylic to raw, unstretched canvas, building up with layers of watercolorlike transparency a surface of variegated luminosity. Then she make an incision ins up the canvas to use as ultimate parts in the collage. The shapes are generally geometrical-quadrilaterals, circles, triangles, etc--though sometimes they are more figurative, reminiscent of the shapes in Matisse's Jazz series. The artist may inscribe her cutouts with oil stick, depicting subdues such as leaves, suns or stones All of this is done upon the floor; Hoff once said that she did not know which cutting side of a canvas would be the top until the painting was finished.

Hoff's esthetic is primarily a lyric single Her works are reactions to the sights and unimpaireds of the world around her. She sometimes attempts synesthesia in trying to capture a wealth of impressions, visual, aural and emotional, in a two-dimensional format. Her titles ofttimes denote the triggering impulse-- highway Music, Hurricane, Restless City and thus on. Other works make allusions to inspiring forebears or colleagues: the collage ultimate parts of Homage to Frank Lloyd Wright are inscribed with architectural uncompounded bodys while in Homage to Martha Graham there are abstract forms that recall dancing figures.

What makes it difficult to define Hoff's work is the diversity she achieves within her chosen format. The piece reproduc here could be replaced by dint of another which would give an entirely different idea of her work. The underlying influence, from the 1970 upon is Synthetic Cubism and its variants--Picasso and Delaunay on the other hand also Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Stuart Davis. The more geometric works recall Klee magnified a hundredfold And in the extremity anyone working in large, lyric collage is going to be compared with Matisse. It is to Hoff's credit, I think, that she doesn't disguise her sources, on the contrary uses them boldly, with a vitality that belies her years.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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