Hope 1930
In the complexity of his artistic means - painting, drawing, collage, installation, sculpture, video, book, object - Andy Hope subverts categorizations of form and content in 1930. Hope develops a complex iconography, designs fictional worlds that move between the ruins of history and fantastic visions of the future, and creates, as he himself describes, a "labyrinthine infinity." His references include the history of modernism, especially Suprematism, the astrophysics and philosophy of the time, and popular cultural sources, including classic Hollywood cinema of the 1930s, B-movies, and the entire science fiction genre in comics and film. For Nymphenburg, Andy Hope developed the character of Robin Dostoyevsky in 1930 as a youthful hero, oscillating between man and woman, hero and assistant, good and evil.
Two personalities that at first seem irreconcilable merge into one: on the one hand, Robin, Batman’s sidekick and a central hero of the comic series, at times also described as his “secret” gay friend. On the other, the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose novels were originally published largely in serial form as feuilleton novels, a format not unlike that of comics.
Graphic elements such as the belt buckle bearing the initials RD, the black horned sun as an emblem on the chest, and details such as the hairstyle, mask and shoes assume an autonomous role, much as they do in comics. Painted from head to toe in platinum, the figure’s “metallic surface contradicts the materiality of the porcelain,” as Hope puts it, “while at the same time heightening the ambiguity of the character.”
