ArtistDanishb.1914–d.1990
Johannes Hofmeister
1 active items
Johannes Gjurup Hofmeister was born on 1 December 1914 in Hjørring, northern Jutland, into a devout household that steered him first toward a trade: he trained and worked as a bricklayer. It was not until 1939, after attending a lecture by painter and printmaker Karl Aksel Jørgensen at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, that Hofmeister took up painting. He remained entirely self-taught for the rest of his life.
His early canvases from the years on Halsagervej in central Hjørring (1939-1950) were naturalistic, the picture space closing tightly behind the figures, the colour warm and slightly compressed. A shift came when he moved to the countryside outside Hjørring in 1950. Working outdoors, Hofmeister developed a more stylized formal language: pasty, directional brushstrokes built up surface weight and substance, and a pronounced verticality entered the compositions - figures that read almost like standing stones against broad, open grounds.
In 1962 he bought Vennebjerg Mølle, a Dutch windmill and millhouse in Lønstrup on Vendsyssel's west coast, and moved there permanently in 1966. The sea replaced the inland horizon, and his palette cooled. He described the large forms of the Jutland landscape as lying "in repose like great animals," and that patient, almost geological stillness runs through his mature work. His stays on the island of Læsø in the 1950s had already introduced sea light to his painting; at Lønstrup it became the dominant note. His final paintings from the mid-1980s arrived at near-minimalism: three horizontal bands of ochre, grey and blue, with figures stretched from canvas edge to edge.
From 1950 he exhibited regularly at the Vrå Exhibition (Vrå-udstillingen), the annual show established by his friend Svend Engelund in 1942, and he participated in group exhibitions including the 1952 inaugural show of the Holstebro Art Society. He was represented in the collection of Vendsyssel Kunstmuseum, Statens Museum for Kunst (the National Gallery), the Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, the Skovgaard Museum, and the Kunstbygningen in Vrå. Vendsyssel Kunstmuseum held a dedicated focus exhibition on his work in 2019.
On the Nordic auction market Hofmeister appears most frequently at Bruun Rasmussen in Aarhus and Lyngby, reflecting his regional profile in Jutland. The 20 items in our database are dominated by paintings and pencil drawings. Top prices have reached 4,600 DKK for signed landscape drawings with figures, with oils typically selling in the 1,700-3,400 DKK range - consistent with a solidly regional, collectible market rather than a speculative one.