Alte Hasen: Erika Hoffmann-Koenige in conversation with Peter Herbstreuth

7 pm

After having studied art history in Freiburg, Vienna and Bonn between 1958 and 1963, Erika Hoffmann-Koenige worked as a research fellow at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne. Over the course of 20 years she was the designer of the ladies’ line Lady van Laack in her husband Rolf Hoffmann’s textile business. In 1991 she curated the exhibition Buchstäblich – Bild und Wort in der Kunst heute for the Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal. Besides this, in the early 1990s, she and her husband also campaigned for a new public gallery designed by Frank Stella to be built in Dresden; a project never realized. In 1994 the couple moved to Berlin where they renovated the Sophie-Gips-Höfe in Berlin-Mitte in order to gain a space for their “inhabited collection” which can be visited by the public in yearly changing arrangements since 1997. In 2009 the Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau in Dresden presented the exhibition Mit dem Fahrrad zur Milchstraße, curated with works from the Hoffmann Collection by Erika Hoffmann-Koenige in collaboration with Ulrich Bischoff and Mathias Wagner.

The art and architecture critic Peter Herbstreuth (born 1959) has been teaching “Theory of Art and Composition” at the University of the Arts Berlin since 1998. Between the years 2004 and 2008 Herbstreuth was vice president of the German section of the International Association of Art Critics (aica). He is the author of numerous publications such as Eine kleine Geschichte der Synagoge (Verlag Dölling + Galitz, 1999), transplant (Hatje Cantz, 2000), Unterwegs am Golf (Verlag Hans Schiler, 2006), Miwa Yanagi: Deutsche Bank Collection (ABC Verlag, 2007), Weltreise der Photographie (Verlag Janos Stekovics, 2008) and Listen to your Eyes (Walther König, 2009). Peter Herbstreuth lives and works as an independent curator and art critic in Berlin.

Talk in German