Ira Hoffecker is a German-Canadian artist.
Relocating from Germany to Canada in 2004, now a Canadian citizen, she resides
and maintains her art practice in Victoria, Canada. She is an active member of
the Federation of Canadian Artists.
In August 2018 Ira achieved an MFA degree from
Plymouth University in England and Transart Institue, New York, N.Y. Ira
achieved a First Class Bachelor (Honours) in Fine Art from the University of
Gloucestershire, England in 2015.Previously, Ira studied art at the Vancouver
Island School of Art in Victoria, Canada where she obtained a Diploma of Fine
Arts in 2013.
Ira has exhibited in solo, duo and group
exhibitions in England, Canada and Germany. In 2015, Ira was one of 20 UK
graduates whose work was shortlisted for the Graduate Art Prize in London. She
won the first prize in the juried 'Abstract Show 2015' in Vancouver with her
painting Alexanderplatz VIII. Her Camp Moschendorf II painting was shortlisted
for the John Moore Painting Prize 2016. The painting was exhibited at the 2016
Liverpool Biennial.
Ira's film Meanwhile in La La Land was chosen
for the Official Selection at the Manchester Film Festival 2018 and was
nominated for Best Documentary at the Back in the Box Film Festival in Los
Angeles in 2017. Her video History as Personal Memory was chosen for the
Official Selection in reserve for the German United Film Festival in Berlin in
2018.
My paintings are informed by the different identities cities take
on over a period of time.
I am interested in how different societies
transform and change city spaces over the course of the centuries. My work
examines the relationships between people and cities by responding to constant
change, reconstruction and restoration in the urban landscape.
Decay, erasure, covering, revealing and
rebuilding take place at the same time and are part of my painting practice. I
see my process of covering as a metaphor for forgetting and suppressing the
past. The process of revealing and sanding the surface down alludes to a
process of remembering and acknowledging, reconciling historic events. The
layers are equivalent to the archaeological strata in the evolution of a city.
Places are overlaid with multiple histories, layers of paint cover and obscure
but each coat is also informed by the previous layer.
I adopt geometric shapes inherent in
architecture and maps from different times in history that provide the basis of
my compositional language. Studying history books, maps and photographs, as
well as digesting the city by walking the streets, all inform my understanding
of the identity of a place.
On a personal level, my paintings embody my own
memories and the cities' atmospheres, which I am translating through shapes,
colours and lines: marks that articulate the physicality of painting. I use
painting to explore the city's evolution and add my own experience to the
context.
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