Stephen HOBBS (b. 1972)

BIOGRAPHY

Steven Hobbs graduated from Wits University with BAFA in 1994. Since 1994, Johannesburg has served as a critical reference for his artistic and curatorial insights into the apartheid city turned African city.

Hobbs was the curator of the Market Theatre Galleries, Johannesburg (1994 – 2000), and Co-Director of the purpose-built Gallery Premises at the Joburg Theatre (2004 – 2008).

Since 2001, he has co-directed the artist collaborative and public art consultancy, The Trinity Session. From 2002 onwards, The Trinity Session provided curation and coordination services for various urban regenerative public art programmes for the City of Johannesburg, Durban and Port Elizabeth (now Gqerberha). And from 2004 onwards, Hobbs co-produced a range of multi-media urban and digital network-focused projects with Marcus Neustetter, under the collaborative name Hobbs/Neustetter.

In 2017, Hobbs joined the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg, as Unit Leader and resident critic.

He has a particular interest in the impact of defensive urban planning and architecture on the behavioural aspects of city and society.

Dazzle camouflage has been a key trope in his practice for many years – a zebra-like pattern used on gunships in the early 1900s to fragment the visual field of enemy sites in combat situations. Although dazzle patterning became obsolete after World War I, Hobbs has mined the potential that such visual deception presents for aesthetic reflection on dystopian urban environments.

Hobbs is committed to, in his words, ‘constantly exploring the intersections of positive and negative space with a variety of experimental objects and tectonic moves’, be it in the corridors and buildings of Johannesburg, World War I and World War II theatres of war, myriad hospital interiors, or construction sites.

During his stay in the Republic of Ireland (2019 – 2021), he began to activate a new making trajectory influenced by a three-year-long research project resulting in his Permanent Culture exhibition in Cape Town and Johannesburg in 2015.

The exhibition text accompanying Man Shouting in the Distance, his 2024 solo exhibition at the Wits Art Museum, reads:

City planning, structural engineering, orthopaedic surgery, artistic deception in the battlefield and contingent building technologies have provided lenses for an artmaking practice concerned with visual and material equivalents for defensiveness, congestion, precarity, entropy, and death. These concepts are explored through video, printmaking, bookmaking, assemblage and sculpture.

Hobbs’s sustained relationship with David Krut Projects has broadened his artistic repertoire through printmaking, book making and publishing. In addition, David Krut Projects New York has produced a variety of his talks, presentations and workshops in numerous universities and institutions throughout the United States.

SOURCES
‘Biography,’ Stephen Hobbs, https://stephenhobbs.net/pdfs/STEPHENHOBBSBIOCV_2020.pdf.
‘Wits Art Museum – Stephen Hobbs: Man Shouting in Distance,’ Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/WitsArtMuseum/photos/join-us-at-wam-for-the-opening-of-stephen-hobbs-man-shouting-in-distance-on-tues/1037792201685753/?_rdr.
‘Stephen Hobbs,’ David Krut Projects, https://davidkrutprojects.com/artists/218/stephen-hobbs.