William Hine is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Xander Hoffman, offsite at The Bear, Camberwell, on view from 10 October - 15 November, 2025

Hoffman is a Manchester-based painter whose work explores the compelling dialogue between the digital image and traditional painting techniques. A graduate of the Glasgow School of Art’s Painting and Printmaking program, Hoffman explores how screen-based visuals—fleeting, weightless, and often overlooked—can be transformed into enduring physical experiences. Working primarily in oil paint, he frequently utilises industrial materials such as aluminium panels as surfaces and retro-reflective pigments allowing him to experiment with surface, depth, and luminosity. The use of aluminium is particularly significant: its sleek, cold materiality resonates with the digital realm, while also providing a non-absorbent ground that alters how paint behaves—allowing for sharper edges, smooth gradients, and a subtle interplay between light and surface reflection.

Hoffman’s recent practice involves working from his own photographs, often capturing his desired subject in reflections from screens or other digital displays. These images—sometimes disorienting, pixelated, distorted —serve as both reference and raw material. By translating them into paint, he slows down their consumption and reasserts their presence in the physical world. His paintings are not exact reproductions, but meditations on how the digital image is seen, remembered, and misremembered. In some works, pixels become painterly gestures; in others, light leaks and chromatic aberrations are treated as expressive opportunities..

This re-materialisation process—a kind of digital archaeology—enables Hoffman to create a tension between the mechanical and the handmade, the instant and the enduring. Through these strategies, he offers a quiet but persistent challenge to our relationship with screens, asking what is lost and what might be recovered when images are no longer ephemeral but held in paint.