PHILIPP FÜRHOFER

Born in Augsburg, Bavaria in 1982, Fürhofer moved to Berlin to study under Hans-Jürgen Diehl at the Berlin Uni­ver­sity of the Arts in 2002. While there, he was vis­ited by Hans Neuenfels, highly regarded for his work in exper­i­mental the­atre. Neuenfels dis­cov­ered Fürhofer’s love of opera and invited him to assist him in stage design at the­atres in Bayreuth and Zurich. It was this introduc­tion that lead Fürhofer to the unique posi­tion he occu­pies today: he has cre­ated award winn­ing set designs for many of the world’s foremost opera houses includ­ing London’s Royal Opera House and the Dutch National Opera in Ams­ter­dam, while remain­ing fer­vently committed to his fine art practice.

Fürhofer’s arrest­ingly beau­tiful art works are multi-lay­ered and entranc­ing. They func­tion as light boxes, but also as paint­ings. Depend­ing on whether the light is turned on or off, the con­tents are either illu­minated or shrouded for the viewer. In the works where the light rhythmically switches on and off via a timer, the viewer has to con­cen­trate in order to con­sume the informa­tion relayed in these alternat­ing states. This game interferes with the more straightforward act of looking that a viewer might adopt when perus­ing a tra­di­tional paint­ing, instead plac­ing him in a much more active role where he is encour­aged to move around the work and adopt differ­ent posi­tions of engage­ment.

Through his work for the stage, Fürhofer learnt how to cap­ti­vate an audi­ence by draw­ing them into a space in a con­stant state of flux, so that there is always some­thing new unfold­ing for the dura­tion of often lengthy performances. It is Fürhofer’s aware­ness of the role of the viewer, that casts him in such a unique posi­tion as an artist. Not only is the viewer active, rather than pas­sive in rela­tion to his practice, the spy-foil surfaces of Fürhofer’s works reflect the viewer when the light is off, and then ban­ish his reflec­tion when the light is on, caus­ing him to look beyond his own image and into the inte­r­ior of what the work con­tains. An easy compar­i­son to arrive at when con­sid­er­ing Fürhofer’s practice, is a cor­po­real read­ing of the work. Indeed Fürhofer was first inspired to cre­ate his multi-lay­ered objects with their light tubes, bulbs, rub­ber pipes and blend of organic and inorganic mat­ter, after looking at x-rays of his own chest cav­ity when he was lying in a Berlin hos­pital. The strange sense of dis­loca­tion between looking into an image of one’s own insides, while simulta­ne­ously pre­sent­ing a con­tained, appar­ently her­met­ically sealed ves­sel to the out­side world, was a strange, but inspir­ing para­dox for Fürhofer.

It is important not to confine his practice to a strictly phys­ical interpreta­tion. There is a strongly spir­i­tual qual­ity to Fürhofer’s cre­ations. They not only encour­age the viewer to par­tic­ipate in a visual game of looking and remem­ber­ing, ordered by the con­trolled time frame, their evoca­tive nature prompts the viewer to slip between tem­po­ral and spir­i­tual planes, and reach for a higher order of things inspired by beauty, art and music. There is a strange poetry inher­ent in the every­day - even in the detri­tus that spills over in our lives - and Fürhofer is adept at cap­tur­ing this, playing with the stereotype of cre­at­ing a sense of the­atre through exper­i­ment­ing with smoke, light and mirrors. At the heart of his practice though is a ser­i­ous core: grounded in a deep aware­ness of the fragility of human exis­tence and the interface between the spark of life and cre­ativ­ity and the shad­ow­land that waits in the wings.

Fürhofer’s work has been exhib­ited around the world in gal­ler­ies in Hamburg, Milan, Berlin, Sydney, Cologne, Munich and Hong Kong. In 2012 the Bavar­ian National Museum, Munich, pre­sented his solo exhi­bi­tion Breakthrough. He has been the recip­i­ent of numer­ous awards includ­ing the Nextgastein Artist Res­i­dency at Bad Gastein, Aus­tria, 2011.

He lives and works in Berlin.