From 1928 to 1930 Hofmann studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau, where he learned from Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky.
When the National Socialists took power, his work was banned as degenerate and he fled to Switzerland and Paris as a member of the KPD.
In 1935 he returned to Germany, married Hanna Stirnemann and lived in seclusion in Hainichen near Dornburg, where the couple worked closely with the ceramist Otto Lindig.
The exhibition The Poetics of the Bauhaus in the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa[3] divides his life's work into four phases: Das Bauhaus und die Jahre der Zensur, Russland, Das geteilte Deutschland und die europäischen Aufenthalte sowie Pompeiana.
[2] The art historian Helmut Börsch-Supan said about Hofmann's work: Für mich sind seine Bilder und die Ausstrahlung seiner Persönlichkeit untrennbar miteinander verbunden.