Visionary artist Martina Hoffmann was born in Germany, grew up in Cameroon in West Africa, and now lives in Spain with her husband, artist Robert Venosa, who I profiled last week.
She paints intricate, detailed works inspired by dreams and the unconscious, which makes it appropriate to call her work surreal, in spite of how picky I can be about the indiscriminate use of that term. Her pieces often involve themes of fertility, pregnancy, birth and other invocations of the universal feminine, as well as suggestions of altered stares of consciousness or spiritual awakening.
She shares with Venosa a kinship to the liquid-reality visions of Surrealists Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst and Dali, and a fascination with the combination of imagined forms with traditional landscape elements. In her case there is also often an incorporation of intricate patterns, suggestive of radiant spiritual or biological energy, surrounding, or emanating from, living things, that brings to mind the work of Alex Grey.
Hofffmann also has a fascinating series of portraits, in which there is a suggestion of other-worldliness or spitiruality to the backgrounds and settings.
There is a gallery of her work on the beinArt Surreal Art Collective; and along with Venosa, she is one of the artists featured in their new collection Metamorphosis, which I wrote about in this post.
There is also a gallery of her work on the Society for the Art of Imagination, along with a bio and interview.
Addendum: I received a notice that Martina Hoffmann and Robert Venosa are conducting a series of workshops on Visionary Painting, the latest of which will be held this November 24th to 30th in Boulder, Colorado.
