Hugo Hoffmann (graphic designer)

Hugo Hoffmann in front of his atelier hand press, December 2015

Hugo Hoffmann (born December 17, 1947 in Berlin ) is a German graphic artist , typesetter and printer from the circle of artists of the Berlin painter-poets (Kreuzberger Bohème) and founder of the publishing house and Edition Atelier-Handpresse in Berlin-Kreuzberg .

Live and act

During his school days at a boarding school, Hoffmann was head of the boarding school printing company. After graduating from high school in 1967, he initially worked as a laborer in the Deutsche Zentral-Druckerei and began studying political science and journalism. In 1968 chance brought him together with Kurt Mühlenhaupt , who at the time was still a junk dealer in Berlin-Kreuzberg and had taken over the inventory of a closed printing company. So it came about that Hoffmann Mühlenhaupt printed the first book Die Drehgeschichte . In the following years Hoffmann became a printer, typesetter, editor and adlatus and friend of Mühlenhaupt, with whom he went on a long journey through Sweden, Norway and Lapland in 1972. In the same year Hoffmann founded his own printing company, the Atelier-Handpresse ?? in Berlin-Kreuzberg. There was also a particularly close collaboration with Aldona Gustas and Günter Bruno Fuchs . There were hand press prints with many other Kreuzberg authors and graphic artists, own graphic and typographic work, commissioned work as well as frequent collaboration with Berlin art offices (Kreuzberg, Wedding, Wilmersdorf and Charlottenburg) and galleries.

Hoffmann worked over the years with many artists and authors such as B. Arno Waldschmidt , Artur Märchen , Gerhard Kerfin , Wolfgang Bittner , HC Artmann , Oswald Andrae , Hans Sünderhauf , Günter Bruno Fuchs , Inka Bach , Nepomuk Ullmann , Gerald Bisinger , Eva-Maria Geisler , Wolfgang Windhausen , Gabriele Schmelz , Ingeborg Drewitz , Richard Anders , Robert Wolfgang Schnell , Kurt Neuburger and many more. The atelier of the atelier hand press also served as a reading stage, museum, think tank, picture gallery and meeting point for artists; this is also where the Rixdorfer Drucke workshop (the Rixdorfer) met, for over four decades in Hoffmann's atelier in the Kreuzberg backyard to celebrate and work together.

Hoffmann set, printed, illustrated, bound and published numerous works not only in his publishing house, but also in his friends' Kreuzberg printing houses. His works are works of art in small editions, illustrated with graphics, hand-bound and hand-picked. Hoffmann sees lead letters as bridges to poetry, prose and graphics. Again and again he discovered artists and writers who would not have become known to a wider public without him.

In 1975 Hoffmann co-founded the Kreuzberger Künstlerkreis eV and became its first chairman. In the same year he organized exhibitions of Kreuzberg artists in the partner cities of the district ( Porta Westfalica , Wiesbaden, Limburg, Heppenheim).

In 2017 Hoffmann closed his studio and thus also finished working on the studio hand press , which had become a Kreuzberg institution.

Exhibitions (selection)

Exhibitions, including in Frankfurt / Main, Nuremberg, Wiesbaden, Mainz

• 1976: University library of the Free University of Berlin
• 1997: Book shop & gallery in Frankfurt am Main
• 1998: The Impossible Way to Make Books, Kreuzberg Museum
• 2009/2010: Galerie Nierendorf Künstlergraphiken from own publishing house 371 works by 47 artists

bibliography

Catalogs (selection)

• 4 Kreuzberger in Osnabrück . Artur Märchen , Hugo Hoffmann, Heidrun Thiede and Roland Neumann are exhibiting. Atelier hand press, Berlin 1985.

Illustrations (selection)

• Uwe Helfrich: Bee sting . Atelier hand press, Berlin 1976
• Wolfgang Fehse: The hole in the middle of the cake . Three episodes, atelier hand press, Berlin 1994

(Co-) editorships (selection)

• Kurt Mühlenhaupt : Kurt Mühlenhaupt exhibits what he thinks is art, as if there were books, pictures and drawings , on the occasion of his 50th birthday. (Exhibition from September 23 to October 24, 1971), Verlag Fördererkreis Kulturzentrum, Berlin 1971.
• Günter Bruno Fuchs and Willi Mühlenhaupt . Together with Lothar Klünner. Exhibition catalog. Berlin 1977
• Mensch Mühlenhaupt - A brief reading by the painter and poet Mühlenhaupt for the 70th , together with Ulrich Bormann. Edition by ARTgenossen Nicolai Verlag, Berlin, 1991
• The impossible way to make books. 25 years of the atelier hand press . Catalog for the exhibition in the Kreuzbergmuseum from February 15 to April 13, 1998. Kunstamt Kreuzberg, Berlin 1998

literature

• Horst Rudolph, Robert Wolfgang Schnell , Heinz Ohff et al .: Handpicked. The tradition of making books in small Berlin publishers and workshops . Ed .: Kunstamt Kreuzberg. Argon, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-87024-160-8 .
• Librarium , Journal of the Swiss Bibliophile Society, Volumes 24–25, 1981.
• Heinz Stefan Bartkowiak: Compendium of contemporary hand press printing - Compendium of contemporary hand press printing , Verlag HS Bartkowiak, 1992.
• Marginalia , editions 145–148. Pirckheimer-Gesellschaft, 1997.
• Jan Klinkel: In the center - a type case. The atelier hand press in Berlin-Kreuzberg , Bachelor thesis, University of Technology and Economics Berlin, 2016.
• Hanno Hochmuth: Neighborhood history. Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg in divided Berlin . Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2017, ISBN 978-3-8353-3092-4 ( limited preview in Google book search).

Web links

• Literature on and in the Atelier press in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Hugo Hoffmann Collection . Retrieved January 22, 2018 .  Short CV and list of works, compiled by the FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum , online at museum-digital.de
2. ↑ ^{a b} The impossible way to make books . Retrieved January 22, 2018 .  Exhibition information from the FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum , online at museum-digital.de
3. ↑ Ulrike Schwartzkopff-Lorenz: Kurt Mühlenhaupt - an artist monograph . (Diss. Free University of Berlin) 2008,
4. ^ Program ( memento of August 22, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) of the Lettrétage , see note on Sunday, December 6, 2009 about the collaboration between Hoffmann and Gustas and Fuchs.
5. ^ Result for '"atelier hand press"' [WorldCat.org]. Retrieved January 22, 2018 . 
6. ^ Hanno Hochmuth: Kiezgeschichte. Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg in divided Berlin . Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2017, ISBN 978-3-8353-3092-4 ( limited preview in Google book search).
7. ↑ Picture book - Berlin-Kreuzberg  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Documentation of the rbb from January 27, 2017, online at rbb-online.de  
8. ^ Gregor Eisenhauer : Obituary for Gerhard Kerfin (born 1935) foolish jokes in Der Tagesspiegel of June 16, 2016, online at tagesspiegel.de
9. ↑ Kurt Mühlenhaupt in the Frankfurt graphic letter on the closure of the Atelier hand press, online at grafikbrief.de
10. ↑ Susanne Ebeling (Ed.): Literary exhibitions from 1949 to 1985 - Federal Republic of Germany - German Democratic Republic. Discussion, documentation, bibliography . Literature and Archive Vol. 5, KG Saur / Walter de Gruyter, Munich 1991, ISBN 9783111539508 .
11. ↑ Exhibition archive ❦ Book Guild bookstore. Retrieved January 22, 2018 . 
12. ^ Elmar Schütze: Hugo Hoffmann's work in the Kreuzberg Museum: Books are works of art . In: Berliner Zeitung . ( Online [accessed January 22, 2018]).
13. ^ Ergün Özdemir-Karsch, Hugo Hoffmann: Artist graphics from own publishing house - 371 works by 47 artists . Exhibition October 23, 2009 - March 26, 2010, Volume 86 of Kunstblätter der Galerie Nierendorf , Verlag Galerie Nierendorf, 2009
14. ↑ Jan Klinkel: In the center: A type case: The Atelier hand press in Berlin-Kreuzberg . 2016 ( online [accessed January 22, 2018]).