With Otto Hofmann - the imaginary and the real. From Bauhaus to a free artist. Works 1930-1954, the Biscozzi | Rimbaud Foundation reaches the milestone of its tenth exhibition.

Born in the Ruhr and raised in Thuringia, Otto Hofmann (1907-1996) perfected his painting education at the Bauhaus in Dessau, where he was a student of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. The profile of an artist emerges who embraced abstraction with extreme originality and without any dogmatism, indeed allowing himself to be "contaminated" by surrealist and dada elements, and not shying away from figurative legacies, often alternating iconic and aniconic outcomes, pursuing a personal coherence based on expressive foundations, rather than adherence to movements and trends understood in a closed sense.


Constant are the stylistic freedom, creative flair, inexhaustible inventive curiosity, and the ability to react to the ugliness of history and the harshness of existence by relying on the saving power of art, in which Hofmann managed to find a reason for living and a means of affirming his exceptional personality. The works of Hofmann presented in the exhibition are almost fifty and, as indicated in the subtitle, cover a chronological period from 1930 to 1954.

Each of the three rooms that make up the exhibition path houses works belonging to distinct phases of the artist's production. First, there are the oil paintings on canvas and the papers from the Thirties. The second room accommodates watercolors on thin sheets of paper from the letters sent to his wife and friends, testimonies of his imprisonment in Soviet Russia from 1940 to 1946, and also includes dramatic period photographs documenting the terrible consequences of the war. The last room, finally, houses a series of paintings dating from 1947 to 1954: a tumultuous period, from his return to Germany, where Hofmann reintegrated as one of the protagonists of the post-war revival, among the leading figures of the legendary Galerie Gerd Rosen, to his escape to West Berlin, and subsequent move to Paris in 1950 and stays in Cagnes-sur-Mer on the French Riviera.