Otto Hoffman. The Imagined and the Real. From the Bauhaus, a free artist. Works 1930-1954

Exhibition: Otto Hoffman. The Imagined and the Real. From the Bauhaus, a free artist. Works 1930-1954

Curator: Paolo Bolpagni e Giovanni Battista Martini

Catalogue: Dario Cimorelli Editore, Milano

Exhibition venue : Fondazione Biscozzi | Rimbaud ETS, piazzetta Baglivi 4, 73100 Lecce – the spaces are fully accessible

Open to the public: 22 June – 14 September 2025

Timetable: Tuesday to Sunday: 5 pm – 9 pm. Closed on Monday

Full ticket: € 8,00; reduced: € 5,00 (for groups of more than 15 people residents in Lecce and in the province, children under 18, primary and secondary schools group, students of university, art academies and conservatories with booklets, teachers).
Free admission: for children up to 6 years old, the disabled (and a companion), a companion for each group, tourist guides, journalists with ID cards.

With Otto Hoffman – the Imagined and the Real. From the Bauhaus, a free artist. Works 1930-1954, the Fondazione Biscozzi | Rimbaud marks the milestone of its tenth exhibition.

Born in the Ruhr Valley and raised in Thuringia, Otto Hofmann (1907-1996) received his crucial training at the Bauhaus, where he studied under Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. 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.

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 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. In the second room we find watercolours painted on thin sheets of paper from letters sent to his wife and friends, which bear witness to his detention in Soviet Russia from 1940 to 1946. There are also dramatic vintage photographs that document the terrible consequences of war. 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-Mer on the French Riviera.