ORIGINAL 1988 Hofmann watercolor now at auction!

This watercolor, ink, and mixed-media work on paper is one of five unique collages Hofmann produced in 1988, four circular and one square. All five can be viewed together here at artabolic.com/collages. The piece is full of serious and silly signifiers of masculinity, muscularity and masonry.

Bid it up! Help support both the preservation of The Richard Hofmann Art Estate Collection as well as the Tom of Finland Foundation.

Moving clockwise from the top, we first encounter a faded, sketchlike clipping of an urban tumble of buildings, surmounted by a vertical spire that appears to be the Empire State Building. Carefully cut around its crown, the building acquires an even more whimsical phallicity.

Next, Christ the King is transformed into a number, but no ordinary number. This regal seven comes from a commercial advertisement, reflecting the East Village art of the 1980s and its delight in deconstructing and appropriating commercial imagery. Its bold yellow is perhaps the first thing that catches the eye: a color doubtless formulated in some corporate laboratory and appropriated here for its visual power.

We next find a naked, ripped Christ posing and balancing perfectly upon a northward-pointing, arrow-shaped box, concealing his sinful joy in shame. Adjacent, his larger and thicker shadow seems to be pleasuring itself.

As a palate cleanser, at roughly seven o’clock on the dial, Christ becomes a ballerina. Again, the number 7. Coincidence? Her sinuous, muscular legs, en pointe, are exposed as far as her skirt will allow, flanked by two male bodybuilders, one to her left and another above, the uppermost figure seeming to explode into the air in orgiastic freedom.

One further thing is worth pointing out: the figures behind the pasted images are drawn largely from the enormous, rapidly sketched NPC “non-player” cast of Hofmann characters. Even after more than two decades of familiarity with his work, I am always discovering an unexpected face or animal I had never noticed before.

The fact that the artist spilled no ink on the pasted images pushes the background onto a separate visual plane. It seems almost capable of rotating independently beneath them, as the eye fills in the interrupted figures and lines between the collage elements.