The Kunstmuseum Moritzburg in Halle, Germany, is presenting its first major solo exhibition of renowned modern painter Karl Hofer in nearly fifty years. Titled "Between Beauty and Truth," the exhibition features approximately fifty works from the Leipzig Collection Arthous alongside a piece from the museum's own collection, creating a comprehensive display that is unique in both scope and content breadth.
The choice of Halle as the exhibition venue carries special significance beyond mere curatorial decision. The city has maintained an unusually open relationship with Hofer's work throughout history. As early as 1948 and 1949, the Henning Gallery showcased his paintings, and in 1978, the Kunstmuseum Moritzburg dedicated a major exhibition to him for his 100th birthday. This new presentation continues that tradition while adding a historical dimension that became clear during preparation: Hofer died fifty years ago, making this exhibition both an artistic showcase and a gesture of remembrance. Following its run in Halle, the exhibition will travel to Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
Karl Hofer ranks among the most prominent painters of German modernism. The breadth of his oeuvre, with approximately 2,900 works listed in his catalogue raisonné, reveals an artist who constantly questioned himself and whose style refused to conform to any fixed pattern. Much of Hofer's work was lost during World War II bombing raids when his Berlin studio and apartment burned down in 1943, destroying numerous pieces. He found provisional refuge in a garden shed in Potsdam, where he began restoring paintings from memory, reinterpreting motifs, and creating new works out of both recollection and artistic necessity.
Remarkably, Hofer's evolution is reflected even in his signature, as he changed from "Karl" in his early years to "Carl" later in life. These signature modifications mirror the biographical and emotional transformations that accompanied him throughout his life, oscillating between departure and loss, between inner contemplation and external upheaval, between beauty and truth, as the exhibition aptly describes.
The exhibition reveals Hofer's commitment to developing his own unmistakable visual language. Working between Expressionism, New Objectivity, and Magic Realism, he created a painterly form that drew from both modern color psychology and classical compositional principles. At the center of his work stands the human figure, often alone, sometimes in groups, but almost always in a state of contemplative withdrawal. His subjects rarely engage the viewer directly; their eyes are closed, darkened, or cast downward. The paintings function like snapshots of an inner landscape that viewers can only enter indirectly.
Particularly noteworthy is Hofer's only surviving self-portrait, which shows the painter in direct eye contact with the viewer, a motif that represents an exception within his body of work. Collection curator Anke Dornbach points out that Hofer was an extremely self-critical artist who later overpainted many of his works because he felt they weren't good enough. This self-imposed strictness makes both the power of his work and the sometimes ambivalent effect of his paintings understandable.
Since Hofer's style cannot be clearly divided into distinct art historical phases, the exhibition is organized into seven thematic sections. Each chapter illuminates a particular motif within his work while demonstrating how the artist varied these themes over the decades. At the center stands the human being, portrayed in moments of vulnerability, loneliness, and search for identity. Masks and harlequins function as symbols of social roles and psychological disguises. Scenes of wounding, defenselessness, and alienation address experiences of war, loss, and personal suffering, while landscapes and still lifes served Hofer as experimental fields for colors, rhythms, and compositional attempts.
The exhibition not only traces Hofer's world of motifs but also provides insight into his development, from the young artist wrestling with modernism to the late master whose paintings are characterized by quiet, almost meditative seriousness. Hofer's life path cannot be understood without considering the historical ruptures that span nearly an entire century of German history. His marriage to Jewish singer Mathilde Scheinberger led to a consequential turning point in 1938.
Although the couple no longer lived together, they remained married. When his dismissal from the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts threatened, Hofer pushed for divorce, a decision that stripped Mathilde Hofer of protection under the so-called privileged mixed marriage law. She was later murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Nazi cultural policy struck Hofer multiple times: in 1937, 313 of his works were removed from German museums, with nine of them defamed in Munich's infamous "Degenerate Art" exhibition. After the divorce in 1938, he was readmitted to the Reich Chamber, but his professional opportunities remained limited.
The destruction of his studio in 1943 affected him not only materially but also personally, as a large portion of his life's work was irretrievably lost. After the war's end, Hofer returned to the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin and became its director. However, tensions within the postwar art scene, particularly in the conflict between representational and abstract art, led to his publicly aired dispute with critic Will Grohmann in 1955 and ultimately to Hofer's resignation. He died of a stroke shortly thereafter.
The relationship between Hofer and Halle has a special tradition. While discussions about modern art in many parts of Germany were still marked by political and social tensions, Halle's Henning Gallery presented two solo exhibitions of his works as early as 1948 and 1949. In East Germany, Hofer remained an ambivalent figure: on one hand, his symbolic, introspective visual language didn't correspond to the demands of state-promoted Socialist Realism. On the other hand, artists of the so-called Halle School found in his quiet expressivity an important counter-model to official doctrine.
This exhibition was made possible primarily through the Leipzig Collection Arthous, whose extensive holdings of Hofer paintings are being shown publicly in this form for the first time. Fifty works created between 1900 and 1954 provide a rare overview of Hofer's complete oeuvre. The interplay with the museum's own collection and works from the Halle School creates a multi-layered effect, showing Hofer not in isolation but within a network of reception, influence, and lasting impact.
Why does Karl Hofer remain relevant today? The exhibition finds the answer in its title: "Between Beauty and Truth." Hofer focuses on fundamental human questions that exist independent of epoch and style: loneliness, identity, vulnerability, dignity. The silence that radiates from his paintings seems almost visionary today. In a world characterized by visual overstimulation, Hofer opens spaces for deceleration. His figures refuse direct eye contact and thus quick interpretation, creating an intensity that has become rare in modern art. In times of political uncertainty, social tensions, and increasing ideologization, Hofer's work functions as a counter-design that resists any political appropriation, remaining committed to humanity rather than power.
