Andreas Hoffmann 1961 born in Eningen 1982 work with form and content of the mask stay at the theatre academy in Arhus, Denmark Works for theatre 1985 studies of sculpturing at freie Kunsthochschule Nürtingen 1988-89 Studies at HdK Berlin under Prof. S. Taijiri since 1990 work as a free artist Insight into my work: In the centre of my artistic concept and activity lies the human being within his natural and social context. My work has therefore been focused for many years on the exterior image of the human being, in the form of an autoportrait of the human body. This form reaches from a full-length presentation of the body to a more fragmentary one. The human body and his surface with his volume, his structure of pores, his hair, his wounds, his traces of time , becomes a field of research. This kind of research is stressing the detail. The aim of this research is the finding and conserving of traces and the result of it is similar to archaelogical research methods, like e.g. field-cartography. As a self-nominated research worker, my own body is focused as the object and the discovery of my research. Away from a subjective narcistic self-observation , the himan body becomes an abstract , full-lenght image that is composed by many detailed impressions. Within this artistic process the singularity of the human body appears like a landscape, marked by traces of seasons and time. Whereas until the middle of the 90ies my work mainly turned around the body as a whole, it is now dealing with the fragments of the body. The fragment is materialized as a single element and in its lonely representation it reveals the importance of the whole. The starting point of each repesentation of a fragment of the human body is an improvised movement. The complexity of the movement within a context of space is explored. The chosen carriages of the body are modelled by an assistant and additionally filmed by a video camera. With this basic material the process of getting up a graphic or plastic art within a room-context can be started. The used material are basically natural ones: starch as a product of assimilation, wax as a symbol of the mature and the satiated, lead as a symbol of the dark and the transitory, and salt as a symbol of the conserving. All these materials are cyclical, similar to the cycle of the seasons. They stand for the ritual of being and perishing, producing and conserving and are so forming a wholeness, completeness. The idea of the wholeness has been formulated in the big project „Wandlungen“ (Metamorphoses). Within this circle of material, salt has reached a special position, because its characteristic of the conserving implies the power to beware the transitory from death. Projects like „Stückfeld“ (Piecefield) arose from that context. Graphic Arts: For the graphic arts I use Computer technology. I call my experimental technique which is near to the technique of printing „Computerhalographie“. Photos are scanned and videofilms are first digitalized and then printed. The result of the computer print is not far from the common printing result when it is done on a paper that has first been treated with salt. With this technique hightech is combined with nature (salt treated paper). The perspective influences the degree of abstraction.