Search

We are currently updating our website. Visitors may notice inconsistencies throughout the site. We are addressing these issues and will have the site updated as soon as possible.

Judith Hopf at Deborah Schamoni

08_JudithHopf_UP

Artist: Judith Hopf

Exhibition title: UP

Venue: Deborah Schamoni, Munich, Germany

Date: February 2 – March 25, 2017

Photography: Ulrich Gebert, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Deborah Schamoni, Munich

Sabeth Buchmann—Bricklike hands waving at them, sculptures standing like skeletal bodies in the room. Your recent works continue the mixture of alternating geometric abstraction and figuration, object and subject, that is familiar from the genre of comics, and which I also recognize in your Wartende Laptops (Waiting Laptops) and Erschöpfte Vasen (Exhausted Vases): apparatuses and objects with psychological quirks that remind us of ourselves and hence of the question of why we see and feel that which we see and feel, and how we see and feel it. Always a trace too unstable to pass as entirely self-confident “works,” they could be regarded as replacements or placeholders for ourselves: They seem to ask how art could be created beyond the continual reproduction of the forms intended for it in order to touch on the often unclarified relationship we have to it.

Judith Hopf—The hands and the other sculptures are made of fired bricks. First the bricks were formed into various cuboids, and then their forms were hewn out and separated. The bricks used were all originally made of clay, of course, but they

were industrially produced and hence are a standardized size. Any attempt to

make a perfect, geometric form, such as a cuboid, from clay by hand will probably fail. By contrast, the effort to make regular bricks of clay and to make or fire them using technology has been a cultural challenge since time immemorial. It seems we have solved that, at least, today: bricks are technically perfect. They form a regular, repeating pattern when they are laid, and, in the service of architectural requirements (if one has learned the skilled craft of masonry) they form perfect lines and flat surfaces. From an artistic perspective, these contemporary bricks, with their rigid appearance, also have an inherent Donald Judd–like quality. As so often, my sculptures struggle through my fascination for modernity, through the gullies of minimalist art and systems of reference in order to pin their aesthetic experiments with “emptying” to something new or different: for example, the nonfunctioning wheels and parts of a trolley that are produced by pressing clay together. For me, the comic-like quality you mention has less to do with the form of the objects and sculptures than with the narrative level that seems to sneak into all my objects.

From “Loose Forms. Judith Hopf in Conversation with Sabeth Buchmann” in Judith Hopf: UP (Mousse Publishing, 2016)

01a_JudithHopf_UP

03_JudithHopf_UP

Judith Hopf, Untitled (Plinth Montreal), 2016, wood, paint, 120 x 30 x 30 cm

04_JudithHopf_UP

Judith Hopf, Waiting Laptop (Woman in jail), 2016, paint, ink, collage on paper, 103 x 75 cm, framed: 105 x 78 cm

05_JudithHopf_UP

06_JudithHopf_UP

07_JudithHopf_UP

Judith Hopf, Hand 3 (Pointing Hand), 2017, bricks, cement, 104 x 61.5 x 38.5 cm

08_JudithHopf_UP

Judith Hopf, Hand 3 (Pointing Hand), 2017, bricks, cement, 104 x 61.5 x 38.5 cm

09_JudithHopf_UP

Judith Hopf, Hand 3 (Pointing Hand), 2017, bricks, cement, 104 x 61.5 x 38.5 cm

10_JudithHopf_UP

Judith Hopf, Hand 3 (Pointing Hand), 2017, bricks, cement, 104 x 61.5 x 38.5 cm

11a_JudithHopf_UP

12_JudithHopf_UP

13_JudithHopf_UP

Judith Hopf, Ball in Remembrance of Annette Wehrmann, 2016, bricks, cement, Ø 52 cm

14_JudithHopf_UP

Judith Hopf, Rollkoffer 1, 2016, bricks, cement, clay, 49 x 24 x 63 cm

15_JudithHopf_UP

16a_JudithHopf_UP

17a_JudithHopf_UP

18_JudithHopf_UP

19_JudithHopf_UP

Judith Hopf, Hand 4 (Waving Hand), 2017, bricks, cement, 116 x 79 x 31 cm

20_JudithHopf_UP

Judith Hopf, Hand 4 (Waving Hand), 2017, bricks, cement, 116 x 79 x 31 cm

22_JudithHopf_UP

24_JudithHopf_UP

Judith Hopf, Flying Cinema Brickstone Tent, 2016 + UP! Video, fabric, video installation, Ø 300 cm, variable height

25_JudithHopf_UP

Judith Hopf, UP!, 2016, installation view, video, 1:30 min

26_JudithHopf_UP

Judith Hopf, UP!, 2016, installation view, video, 1:30 min

27_JudithHopf_UP

29_JudithHopf_UP

Judith Hopf, MORE, 2015, installation view, video, 4:33 min

30_JudithHopf_UP

Judith Hopf, Untitled (Loch 1), 2017, silkscreen on paper, 100 x 80 cm

31_JudithHopf_UP

Judith Hopf, Untitled (Loch 2), 2017, silkscreen on paper, 100 x 80 cm

32_JudithHopf_UP

Judith Hopf, Untitled (Loch 3), 2017, silkscreen on paper, 100 x 80 cm

↳Related Posts

Search

We are currently updating our website. Visitors may notice inconsistencies throughout the site. We are addressing these issues and will have the site updated as soon as possible.