"Birch Forest, Japan"

pigment-based inkjet print

The subtle color photographs of Josef Hoflehner's work group Patience were created between 2006 and 2013 in cooperation with Jakob Hoflehner, the artist's 25-year-old son. The photographers found the subjects on journeys through Japan, China, Australia, USA, Cuba, Vietnam and Russia. It is not the spectacular and powerful, but rather the quiet beauty of the ordinary that Josef Hoflehner captures with his camera.
In Patience Josef Hoflehner shows his first colour works after almost a decade of pure black and white photography. As in his halftone photographs, the artist remains true to his subtle, reduced and controlled pictorial language, but for the first time deviates from the square dimensions and chooses the landscape format. The photographs are preceded by a long and carefully planned process of creation: the same place often has to be visited several times until the weather and light conditions are right and the subject appears as the artist sees it in his imagination beforehand. The title-giving photograph of the work group Patience is a 111x145 cm Archival Pigment Print on Alu-Dibond: six fishing boats lined up side by side on a snow-covered ground in front of a grey sky, which makes the white hulls of the ships with their brightly painted hulls float in the middle ground without reference. It took Josef Hoflehner five years to find the small harbour "somewhere" in Japan under these conditions. This makes the photograph Patience a symbol of what Josef Hoflehner needs for his photographic art: Patience.
In the genre of landscape photography, Josef Hoflehner's works oscillate between realism and utopia. Graphic austerity is paired with lyrical moods. Josef Ho ehner's photographic mastery and his unerring eye for the special and characteristic features of a motif are condensed in his photographs into carefully composed works of art.
(Gallery Ruziscka, 2013)