Curt Hoppe

Curt Hoppe was born in Minnesota and works and lives in New York. Celine, co-owner of the B.A.N.K. gallery, 42 rue Volta in the 3rd arrondissement near République, invited him by email last year to a first group show of the newly established gallery. He accepted, since he was getting tired of New York. This year's show is a departure of his usual work and has a theme: "Girls of Action".

His large sized paintings are done from photographs of burlesque shows in Gotham city, they reveal his quest to grab the unusual, the punk, the kitch and turn them into colorful replicas of a-political politics, far from the dreary reality of what the US is undergoing right now. It is hyper-realist, yet it isn't photorealism. He considers it a "fun show", free of any pretention. He collaborates with his models who all have some extraordinary and unusual backgrounds.

Like the fat lady who's a professor at Columbia university and does one women shows at night in burlesque theatres, stripping or counter-stripping, making fun of our society. Obviously the fun is there, his brush just reproduces this fun in flesh-tones and gaudy detail.

They are stark representations of fun. But it is more than just the reproduction of a show, they are reproductions of moments and have all the quality of motion. Curt Hoppe, at over fifty, has gone through various stages and has reached perhaps his maturity through an unpretentious depiction of reality, a reality far from the horror of what he witnessed from his studio nearby during the destruction of the twin towers on the fateful September 11.