Otto Hofmann European artist: from the Bauhaus to Italy
curated by Paolo Bolpagni, Giovanni Battista Martini
3 May – 14 July 2024
| Opening hours: | from Tuesday to Sunday 11 am to 7 pm. |
| Admission Ticket | 5 euro Discount ticket (3 euro) for: • Artsupp Card holders • Complesso Museale e Archeologico della Cattedrale di Lucca ticket holders • groups of more than 15 • visitors under 18 years • college students, students enrolled in art schools and conservatories with school ID • members of the military with military ID. Admission free for: • children under 6 years • visitors with disabilities (as well as those accompanying them) • one person accompanying per group • Tuscan university students with university ID • school groups (elementary, middle, and high school) • teachers • ICOM members • reporters and tourist-guides with professional ID. |
The Fondazione Ragghianti presents a major exhibition of over one hundred and twenty works by Otto Hofmann (Essen, Germania, 1907 – Pompeiana, Liguria, 1996). It is the first dedicated to the artist in Italy in about fifteen years and it documents his entire activities, including several unpublished works.
The path opens with the works made at the Bauhaus, where he was a pupil of Albers, Arndt, Dürckheim, Kandinskij, Klee, Meyer, Scheper, Schlemmer and Schmidt, and where a solo exhibition of paintings and drawings was held in 1930. Moreover, his notebooks of the lessons he attended between 1928 and 1930 at the institute of Dessau are on display.
Forcibly recruited in the Wehrmacht troops, Hofmann was sent to Russia, where he remained prisoner until 1946. A series of poignant photos and of precious watercolours, mostly unknown and made on the letters sent to his wife and friends, testifies that tough time.
Furthermore, both the works created in the immediate post-war period on his return to East Germany, in a climate of suffering due to the growing divergences with the new communist leadership, and those he made when he resumed his painter, ceramist, designer and teacher career, alternating long stays in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy, are presented. It is also possible to observe Hofmann as a graphic designer through his woodcuts and lithographs made in the second half of the Forties.
Finally, the exhibition dedicates ample space to the works painted during his twenty-year stay in Pompeiana, in the quiet Ligurian hinterland, where the artist lived the last part of his life, at the end of a pathway characterized by the continuous research in the field of abstractionism. The catalogue (Edizioni Fondazione Ragghianti) includes the reproductions of all the works on display, documents, photos and texts by Paolo Bolpagni, Chiara Gatti e Giovanni Battista Martini.