Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction, an exhibition in California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The exhibition on view until July 21, 2019 brings together nearly seventy works spanning the entirety of the artist's career. This exhibition presents a fresh and eye-opening examination of Hans Hofmann's prolific and innovative artistic practice. Featuring paintings and works on paper from 1930 through the end of Hofmann's life in 1966, the exhibition includes numerous masterworks from BAMPFA's distinguished collection, as well as many seldom-seen works from both public and private collections across North America and Europe. The Nature of Abstraction, curated by Lucinda Barnes, provides new insight into Hofmann's continuously experimental approach to painting and the expressive potential of color, form, and space, reconnecting many of the artist's most iconic late-career paintings with dozens of remarkably robust, prescient, and understudied works from the 1930s and 1940s. BAMPFA holds the world's most extensive museum collection of Hofmann's paintings. In 1963, the German-born American artist donated to the University of California nearly fifty paintings and a significant cash contribution toward the completion of BAMPFA's first museum building, which opened in 1970. The artist made this extraordinary gift in recognition of the University's decisive role in his immigration to America from Germany, allowing him to escape World War II and "start in America as a teacher and artist."