Hilarius Hofstede. The Collages

ISBN: 9788870386042 pp. 104, ill. col. 213, b/n 5 year 2025 price: € 35
add to cart


'With Hilarius Hofstede's work, one has to go back to the beginnings and then realize that archaic origins send us to a not so distant future when computers do crash and civilization can return to a primeval chaos'. (Jean-Michel Rabaté)

'The book becomes like a carrousel, a flickering magic lantern inside the cave in which ancient paleo-imagery is slowly but relentlessly replaced by a contemporary Pop-Speak waging war on Pop in the name of Nature'. (Hilarius Hofstede)

'a concordia discors of beguiling allure'. (William Laffan)

Between 2018 and 2023 Dutch artist Hilarius Hofstede worked on a series of more than two hundred collages, or papiers collés, combining pre-existing images taken from disparate media, including advertising material, postcards, and album covers, and combining art historical references with allusions to Dutch history and Pop culture. This volume publishes more than two hundred of these collages for the first time. They constitute an extraordinary body of work by one of the most consistently inventive artists working today, which is at one and the same time utterly original, provocative and constantly visually arresting. The collages explore the largest of themes, nature, cosmography, psychology, with wit and profound wisdom.
The book includes essays by William Laffan and Jean-Michel Rabaté