Martin Hoffman, American Flag OUR FLAG Pop Art Acrylic Painting, 1975

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signed with initials verso and a stamp Kooter Boogers of America. with an intentionally distressed surface. please see photos.

Martin … Read more signed with initials verso and a stamp Kooter Boogers of America. with an intentionally distressed surface. please see photos.

Martin Hoffman, a prominent artist whose work in the 1970s was simultaneously identified with high art (gritty realist paintings sold through the O.K. Harris Gallery in New York) and low (illustrations for Playboy magazine).
Throughout his career, his style ranged from energetic abstraction and hard-edge pop to photo-based realism and minimalism. In recent years, he created a series of autobiographical paintings in a winsome, cartoon-like style. He also did a series of subtly hued works in which inscrutable words half-disappear into the paint in which they are inscribed.
Hoffman’s first job out of college was as art director for the Miami News, a position that he held from 1956 until 1962. Afterward he worked as a graphic designer in Miami while making paintings at home in his spare time.
His earliest paintings (which were done, he said, as a “testosterone-driven teenager”) were executed in automotive lacquer on 4 x 8 foot sheets of builder’s hardboard. They combined glossy, visceral surfaces and metallic paints with collaged-on metal shapes and mirrors.
In the 1960s, Hoffman’s paintings began to incorporate figures and symbolism with erotic undertones. Through a mutual friend, Sidney Janis saw Hoffman’s paintings and selected one of them for his international “Erotic Art ‘66” exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. Others in the show included Pop Art icons Jim Dine, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist and Tom Wesselman. Hoffman’s painting hung besides an Andy Warhol silkscreen painting of a partially peeled banana.
From 1966 to 1992, Hoffman was a freelance Playboy illustrator. He called those years “a wonderful period – it supported my family.” Hoffman painted a series of nudes titled “Woman Eternal” which was featured in Playboy’s December 1972 issue. Through the years, he also created illustrations for books, record albums, movie posters and print ads. Clients included Pfizer, Caesar’s Palace, Harley Davidson Motorcycles and the NASA Art Program, which commissioned a series of works based on activities at the former Kennedy Space Center. Hoffman had moved to New York City by 1972. On the recommendation of Alicia Legg, a Museum of Modern Art curator who had included his abstract work in a 1962 traveling exhibition, he stopped in at O.K. Harris Gallery where owner Ivan Karp decided to take a chance on the self-assured young artist. So Hoffman joined a stable that included Photorealist painters Robert Cottingham, Robert Bechtle, Ralph Goings and Malcolm Morley, and sculptor Duane Hanson, a fellow South Floridian. Karp said he wanted Hoffman to “get away from depictions of voluptuous females” and recommended that he “go to the Jersey Meadows and look around.”
It was the first group of paintings that he showed at O.K. Harris; other series, “Basements,” “Street People” and “Hulks” followed. All depict the grit and drama of the city in Hoffman’s sumptuous style.
His work is included in a number of Museum collections. See less