This mashup of Teutonic bombast and lurid pop culture begins with a dimly lit gallery of sketchy oils in clashing colors and mismatched frames. Mounted on wooden posts like some ersatz Black Forest, the paintings feature fanciful figures (is that Tarzan amid snowy peaks? a smoldering volcano behind those assembled birdmen?) and are anchored by judicious strokes of black, as if Max Beckmann had drawn comic books. Hulking nearby like a reject from Bruce Wayne's underground lair is a dark armoire sporting massive bat wings. The next room offers a mix of heraldry and totalitarian aesthetics: One wall is covered with bold, black crosses, birds, and arrows on gold-painted newsprint; the opposite displays a huge white relief of muscular figures, one with a jet-plane head, another composed of geometric blocks, the third a curvaceous, though fragmented, woman. The German-born Hofer is a master of scale—the absurd grandeur of mythical gods and their pulp descendants is captured in a vitrine featuring a human-size horned headpiece, a gray orb, and toy dinosaurs. And he's adept at evocative collisions of content, as in the blazing skull looming over a Nazi architect's rendering of an autobahn bridge. With such portentous titles as "The Day Is Ending To Die" scrawled across his paintings, Hofer's improbably dazzling installation suggests that the puerile fatalism of teen angst is of a piece with fascist visions of... More >>>