Johannes Breckner, “Heimkehr des Jugendstils,” Review, DARMSTÄDTER ECHO, August 2016

WALDKUNST Für viele Besucher ist es das Lieblingswerk der aktuellen Saison: Andrea Löfke über Ihre Installation „Platzwahl”

DARMSTADT. Manchmal würde Andrea Löfke gerne Mäuschen spielen. Und beobachten, wie die Besucher ihr Kunstwerk „Platzwahl“ wahrnehmen. Es ist ja das erste Mal, dass die Künstlerin außerhalb von Galerien oder Museen gearbeitet hat. Jetzt stehen ihre bemalten Baumstümpfe alleine im Wald, „frei von meiner Kontrolle, ohne Aufsicht, das widerstrebt schon, wenn ich ehrlich bin, meinem starken Kontrollbewusstsein“, sagt sie. Aber das kann auch von Vorteil sein. Die freie Natur fördert die individuelle Auseinandersetzung der Betrachter, sie wird das Werk im Lauf der Zeit verändern, wie sie auch den Entstehungsprozess schon begleitet hat.

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Watch the video about Platzwahl, 2016 by Andrea Löfke, 8. International Forest Art Path, Darmstadt

Watch the video about the Opening and Exhibition, 8. International Forest Art Path, Darmstadt

Internationales Waldkunst Zentrum “8. International Forest Art Path 2016”

May-Britt Frank-Grosse, “Alles ist möglich -Kunst machen in New York,” Review, ROSEGARDEN, February 2016

Die Künstlerin Andrea Löfke lebt und arbeitet in New York. Nach dem Studium in Leipzig zog sie vor 15 Jahren mit einem Stipendium in der Tasche sofort in die USA. Das Land der unbegrenzten Möglichkeiten versprach ihrer Kunst einen Entfaltungsspielraum, den sie in Deutschland so nicht erlebt hatte. Bis heute profitiert ihrer Meinung nach die Kunstszene in den USA von diesem „everything is possible“ und schafft damit einen wesentlich größeren Reichtum an künstlerischer Vielfalt. Nach einer intensiven Phase, in der sie vor allem die Konsumbegeisterung der US-Amerikaner hinterfragte, interpretiert sie heute in ihren Installationen, Skulpturen und Bildern vor allem die Auswirkungen einer zunehmend vom Naturkatastrophen bedrohten Lebenswelt auf Natur, Kultur und Erinnerung.

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Charles Boone, “Andrea Loefke,” Review, SCULPTURE, September 2014

Confronting the prow of Andrea Loefke’s ark head-on made a powerful first impression. This foreshortened view indicated something vast and ominous looming just inside the gallery but offered only the merest hint of what was actually there. Home­coming marked a significant departure from Loefke’s previous installations, which have filled spaces with all manner of objects, large and small, through which viewer-participants were expected to walk, crawl, and even climb to become part of the visual experience. Here, however, in the middle of an otherwise empty space, was an object—a boat-like platform loaded with stuff—that was more sculpture than installation, something to be experienced through circumnavigation, the more circuits made, the more to be discovered. While Noah’s ark served to rescue the essentials of creation, Loefke’s ark set out to deal with nature in more immediate, personal ways. Her goal as well as her subject was remembrance. Working from a New Yorker’s first-hand experience of Hurricane Sandy, she reimagined, constructed, and juxtaposed sometimes idealized, sometimes rough, remnants of the havoc.

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“Andrea Loefke: Homecoming. Site-Specific Installation at Smack Mellon, New York,“ VERNISSAGE TV, November 16th, 2013

Homecoming is the title of Andrea Loefke’s new installation at the nonprofit arts organization Smack Mellon in Brooklyn.
This site-specific work is an array of assemblages that are made from natural materials such as tree branches as well as man-made objects like milk crates, ladders and picture frames. Placed on top of an elevated boat-shaped platform, the arrangement reminds of debris that has found rescue on a ship after a storm.

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Paul Anthony Black, Feature: “Once upon a time: A conversation with Andrea Loefke,” SCULPTURE, May 2008

In 2007 I came upon German born New York artist Andrea Loefke’s already prodigious and multifaceted sculptural narratives. We embarked on a journey together through the artist’s colorful multiform assemblages, innocent and playful – sophisticated, physiological, and labyrinthine. This resulted in a thorough examination of a series of works by Loefke and how she interacts with the viewer and the objects that come to form her complex conceptual journeys.

– Paul Anthony Black.

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Jonathan Goodman, “Andrea Loefke,” Review, SCULPTURE, December 2006

The seeming simplicity of Loefke’s construction acted as a denial of high culture, offering itself as a world in need of completion…

The gestalt was surprisingly easy to unify, though the disparate objects suggested a relatively complex abstract gathering of differing parts.

Set up as a kind of tableau or an interesting journey into a thicket of shapes and surfaces, the forms kept the eye pleasantly employed. This was truly a show larger than the sum of its parts, involving the viewer in a game of suggested meaning revealed by looking at and physically participating in the art.

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Jeffrey Kastner, “Andrea Loefke,” ARTFORUM, November 2004

An adept young bricoleur with a light touch and a flair of playroom fantasy, Andrea Loefke made her first New York solo show a candy-colored zone of purposefully preadolescent ebullience. Her modest set-piece arrangements – featuring tiny barnyard animals emitting speech bubbles baas and brays; small groves of flora made from string, wire, plastic sheeting and pipe-cleaners; nursery-school wallpaper; and puffy white clouds more suggestive of cotton candy than cumulonimbus – were temperamentally sweet enough to set the average visitor’s teeth on edge.

…In a contemporary art world where optimistic earnestness remains the kiss of death, this show’s preternaturally cheerful tone felt positively uncanny. Was it all a send-up, a detournement of childhood, a subversive critique of innocence? Viewers scouring the show for irony would have found little among Loefk’s loosely connected scenarios.

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