painter.
Hofmann was born in Weißenburg, Bavaria
on March 21, 1880, the son of Theodor and Franziska Hofmann. When he was six he moved with his family to Munich. Here his father took a job with the government.
Starting at a young age, Hofmann gravitated towards science and mathematics. At age sixteen, he started work with the Bavarian government as assistant to the director of Public Works where he was able to increase his knowledge of mathematics.
To sense the invisible and to be able to create it — that is art.
There is in reality no such thing as modern art. Art is carried on up and down in immense cycles through centuries and civilizations.
The art of pictorial creation is so complicated — it is so astronomical in its possibilities of relation and combination that it would take an act of super-human concentration to explain the final realization.
It isn’t necessary to make things large to make them monumental; a head by Alberto Giacometti|Giacometti one inch high would be able to vitalize this whole space.
As a teacher I approach my students purely with the human desire to free them from all scholarly inhibitions, and I tell them, "Painters must speak through paint — not through words."
Basically I hate categorical labels. As a young artist I already was very clear about this — that "objectification" is not the final aim of art. For there are greater things than the object. The greatest thing is the human mind.