Julius Hofmann

Julius Hofmann (b. 1983) lives and works in Leipzig. He studied under Neo Rauch and Heribert C. Ottersbach at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig, graduating in 2011. He paints and makes computer animated films, and treats the two as one practice: the cities, landscapes and figures in the films come out of painting, and the look of animation comes back into the canvases. The light in the paintings is the light of a 3D program opened for the first time, a single spotlight from the left with heavy drop shadows. The animations run on low fi graphics that keep their errors and compression artefacts rather than hiding them, and the visual vocabulary comes from the computer graphics of the late twentieth century, the first generation of games that pulled you into a black screen.

His animated film Ikonen premiered at the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig in 2018, alongside the first two chapters of MoYE - Might of Young Engines, a project he began in 2014. His work was shown in Colours of Descents at G2 Kunsthalle Leipzig in 2017 with Tobias Hild and Robert Seidel, and he has held solo exhibitions at Galerie Kleindienst in Leipzig, at Ornis A. Gallery in Amsterdam and in the Discovery section of Art Brussels in 2019, with group exhibitions at Espronceda in Barcelona and Bačva Gallery in Zagreb.

Hofmann has worked with Plan X since 2022, with Purple Haze in Milan, Lacrimae Rerum at Plan X Capri in 2024 and The Demons Are Us in Milan in 2025.