Maja Hoffmann (born 1956) is a Swiss art collector, art patron, documentary producer, impresario, and businesswoman. She is the founder and president of the LUMA Foundation. She is also part of the shareholder pool made up of descendants of the founder of the Roche Holding AG, which controls the Swiss health-care company Hoffmann-La Roche.[1]
Early life and education
Hoffmann is the granddaughter of the industrialistEmanuel (Manno) Hoffmann (1896-1932), daughter of Daria Hoffmann-Razumovsky (1925–2002) and the pharmaceutical magnate and renowned naturalistLuc Hoffmann (1923–2016).[2] She grew up in the Camargue region of southern France.[3] Her sister is the publisher and philanthropist Vera Michalski and her brother is the businessman André Hoffmann. Maja's other sister, Daria (Daschenka) Hoffmann, passed away in 2019 at the age of 59.[4]
Hoffmann's grandmother, Maja Stehlin (1896–1989), collected Pablo Picasso, Jean Arp, Fernand Léger, Jean Tinguely and Georges Braque. She created the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation (whose collection forms the main core of the Schaulager) in 1933 to honor her grandfather Emanuel, who had died when his car was hit by a train when her father, Luc, was still a child.[5]
In 2015, Steidl published a book offering insight into the private contemporary art and design collection of Hoffmann. The collection is distributed in her various dwelling locations in Arles, Zurich, Gstaad, London and Mustique. The book contains photos by photographer François Halard of these locations mixed with Rirkrit Tiravanija's use of the British nursery rhyme "This is the House that Jack Built".[8]
Hoffmann's philanthropy supports contemporary art, film, and environmental programmes around the world. In the 1990s, she worked at Luc Hoffmann's La Tour du Valat, focusing in on the breeding of the Przewalski’s horse (Equus ferus przewalskii) and she helped reintroduce them to their native Mongolia in 2004.[10]
In 2004, Hoffmann founded the LUMA Foundation (Zurich) as a vehicle to express her ongoing artistic commitments, followed by LUMA Arles (France) in 2013, an experimental and cross-disciplinary platform dedicated to the production of exhibitions, art and ideas, research, education, and archives. Located at the Parc des Ateliers in Arles, a former industrial site, LUMA Foundation includes a resource center designed by architect Frank Gehry; various industrial buildings rehabilitated by Annabelle Selldorf; and a public park designed by landscape architect Bas Smets. The site’s main building, the LUMA Tower by Gehry, opened in the summer of 2021.
Hoffmann works closely with a core group of art advisors that include Tom Eccles (executive director and associate exhibition curator at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College), artist Liam Gillick, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, artist Philippe Parreno and curator Beatrix Ruf on a program of exhibitions and multidisciplinary projects presented each year in the site’s newly rehabilitated venues.
La Chassagnette
Hoffmann also runs the Michelin-starred organic restaurant La Chassagnette, an organic restaurant in the Camargue outside Arles whose chef is Armand Arnal.[15]
Personal life
Hoffmann has two adult children with the film producer Stanley F. Buchthal, who in some of Hoffmann's films, acts as co-executive producer.[16] Buchthal, who comes from Teaneck, New Jersey was a founder of the Bugle Boy company and now runs his own media company, with Liz Garbus, The Dakota Group Limited.[17]