Good Mother Gallery is pleased to present Corner, a solo exhibition by Bay Area-based artist Terry Hoff. For this new presentation of work, Hoff turns inward, meditating on the physical and symbolic geometry of the corner, a site of both containment and expansion. What was once a disciplinary tool in his childhood, a literal corner, used by teachers as punishment, has evolved into a conceptual space. “The corner became a place where my imagination could explode out,” Hoff explains. “Thoughts and ideas bounced off one another.” In this exhibition, Hoff revisits the corner not as a space of shame but as a powerful portal. His new body of work positions the corner as a point of origin, a crucible of energy from which images and forms emerge.

From his home studio in the sleepy coastal town of Half Moon Bay, Hoff creates works that are grounded in culture and lived experience yet tethered to the unknown. Oceanic rhythms, cartoon logic, hallucinatory humor, and a material curiosity all thread through his practice.

Born in 1956 in Prescott, Arizona and raised in California’s Central Valley, Hoff moved to San Francisco in 1978 on a summer scholarship to study art. After leaving art school early despite winning numerous awards, he quickly built a successful career as a freelance illustrator, notably producing work for Atari, including the iconic Asteroids cartridge.

For over a decade, Hoff worked across editorial, advertising, and entertainment industries, all while maintaining a personal studio practice. In the early 1990s, he shifted entirely to fine art and became deeply involved in the emerging San Francisco art scene centered around the Mission District. He exhibited with Four Walls alongside what would come to be known as the Mission School artists and was included in the first Bay area now at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. He received the prestigious Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation and later exhibited in New York and Los Angeles.

Though his visibility waned during the economic downturn of the early 2000s, Hoff’s commitment to his practice never faded. After leaving his teaching post in 2017, he returned to the studio full-time with renewed intensity. Today, Hoff creates work that is formally sophisticated and emotionally charged, blending memory, material, and metaphysics with unfiltered clarity.