Hans Stofer: Walk The Line

Artist list

Hans Stofer

Gallery S O London is delighted to present a new solo exhibition 'Walk the line' by Hans Stofer. In a witty response to Gallery S O London’s challenge of exploring the parameters of the threshold between Art and Design, Stofer has constructed a corridor through which one must pass in order to enter his hidden world and view pieces that attempt to walk the line of maintaining a fragile balance between binary extremes: familiarity and alienation; function and non-function; humour and sadness; beauty and ugliness; found and lost; sanity and madness; preciousness and worthlessness; decency and decadence; purpose and accident; art and design. 

The closed and intimate space within the constructed corridor and its wild and multi-layered conglomeration of objects serve to confront the viewer’s perception of the nature of what is on display. What at first appears to be one unified installation breaks down into a series of items that in a different context might be purely functional, but that accrue a different identity and meaning through their shared space. Stofer’s work seeks to challenge the casual and limiting categorisation that we take for granted in daily life, and in 'Walk the Line' he urges us to look at the exuberant possibilities arising out of a palimpsest concept of art and design. 

Hans Stofer (1957, CH) lives and works in London. Trained as a precision engineer, he then studied Jewellery and Design at the Fachhochschule für Gestaltung in Zurich. He has work in a variety of public collections, including: V&A Museum, London; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Danner Stiftung, Munich; MUDAC, Lausanne; Schweizerisches Landesmuseum, Zurich; Louis Koch Collection, Basel; Crafts Council Collection, London. Since 2006 he is appointed Professor of Goldsmithing, Silversmithing, Metalwork & Jewellery at the Royal College of Art, London.