On Saturday 21 June the Fondazione Biscozzi | Rimbaud ETS in Lecce will inaugurate the exhibition dedicated to Otto Hofmann (Essen, Germany, 1907 – Pompeiana, Italy, 1996), curated by Paolo Bolpagni, former director and current member of the Scientific Committee of the now firmly established Museum in Salento, and by Giovanni Battista Martini, curator of the artist’s archive.
This will be the tenth exposition in the Foundation: now it is just the turn of “Otto Hofmann. The Imagined and the Real. From the Bauhaus, a free artist. Works 1930-1954”.
Born in the Ruhr Valley and raised in Thuringia, Otto Hofmann received his crucial training at the Bauhaus in Dessau, where he studied under Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. There he laid the foundations of a formal language, which would then unfold, showing works of great maturity, from the 1930s until his death in Italy, after a life spent wandering around Europe as the victim first of Nazi persecution, then of long imprisonment in the Soviet Union, and finally of the Communist dictatorship in East Germany, whence he escaped abruptly, leaving behind all his possessions and almost all his artworks.
There emerges the profile of an artist who embraced abstraction, but in a wholly original way and without any dogma, rather letting himself be ‘contaminated’ by Surrealist and Dada elements, while not renouncing figurative legacies, but often alternating representational and nonrepresentational images, pursuing his own personal style rooted in expressionism instead of adhering to movements or strictly observed trends in art. Hence, an authentic ode to freedom.
The exposition presents almost fifty works by Hofmann, which, as the subtitle indicates, cover a time span going from 1930 to 1954. The itinerary is divided into three rooms in which are presented different phases of the production of the artist.
First, we have oils on canvas and papers from the 1930s. Among which an important abstract composition exposed in the solo exhibition that the artist mounted in the Bauhaus in the late spring of 1930. In the second room we find witnesses of his detention in Soviet Russia, where Hofmann, forcibly enrolled in the Wehrmacht, remained a prisoner from 1940 to 1946. The works realised in this troubled period are watercolours he painted on the thin, fragile paper of his letters to his wife and friends, and, moreover, there are dramatic photographs which bear witness to the terrible consequences of war. These are vintage prints, small in size and impressive in their ‘poverty’ which goes hand in hand with their expressive charge. Finally, we have in the third room a series of paintings dating from 1947 to 1954: a bustling time during which Hofmann, after his return to Germany, re-established himself as one of the protagonists of the postwar rebirth. He was among the leading figures of the legendary Galerie Gerd Rosen. He then escaped to West Berlin, subsequently moved to Paris in 1950 with stays in Cagnes-sur-Meron on the French Riviera.
Constant in Hofmann are his independence of language, creative verve, inexhaustible inventive curiosity, and capacity to react to the ugly elements of History and the asperities of life by relying on the salvific force of Art, in which he found a reason for living and the means for expressing an exceptional personality.
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated trilingual catalogue (in Italian, French and English), curated by Paolo Bolpagni and Giovanni Battista Martini, published by Dario Cimorelli Editore.
INFORMATION SHEET
Exhibition: Otto Hofmann – the Imagined and the Real. From the Bauhaus, a free artist. Works 1930-1954
Curated by: Paolo Bolpagni and Giovanni Battista Martini
Catalogue: Dario Cimorelli Editore, Milano
Transfer and accrochage: Ars Movendi, Firenze
Digital communication: Co.M.Media, Lecce
Exhibition Venue: Fondazione Biscozzi | Rimbaud ETS, piazzetta Baglivi 4, 73100 Lecce – spaces are fully accessible to disabled
Inauguration: Saturday 21 June, 2025, at 7 p.m.
Public Opening: 22 June 2025 – 14 September 2025
Timetable: from Tuesday to Sunday, 5pm – 9pm. Closed on Monday
Full Ticket: € 8,00; reduced: € 5,00 (for groups of more than 15 people, children under 18, school groups (primary and secondary schools), students at university, art academies and conservatories with booklets, teachers. Free admission: for children up to 6 years old, disabled (and a companion), a companion for each group, tourist guides, journalists with ID cards.
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