Judith Hopf
Judith Hopf, Flock of Sheep, 2016. Exhibition view of Sala Trenker, Ortisei, Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Collection Museion, Bolzano. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo
Coming to prominence among a generation of artists working in Berlin in the 1990s, Judith Hopf has been working with a diversity of media and supports, be they sculpture, film, drawing, performance or even stage design, as well as organising gatherings, such as the salons she arranged with fellow artists at the bookshop b_books in Kreuzberg, Berlin. Hopf works with everyday materials such as brick, concrete, glass, packaging, and straightforward manufacturing processes. Simple and often full of humour, her works invite viewers to rethink the matters and shapes that form our world as well as to imagine their potentiality to become something else.
One of her most well-known works, Flock of Sheep (2013) is an installation of concrete blocks cast from cardboard shipping boxes that the artist transformed into sheep by adding spindly steel legs and drawing on cartoonish faces. By adorning the sculptures with what she calls a “Saul Steinberg-esque” face, Hopf hoped to draw a parallel between the boxy sheep and the way that we ship our belongings in boxes as we blithely hop from place to place around the world—as docile in the global economy as sheep.
Judith Hopf, Flock of Sheep, 2016. Exhibition view of Sala Trenker, Ortisei, Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Collection Museion, Bolzano. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo
Judith Hopf
Judith Hopf, Flock of Sheep, 2016. Exhibition view of Sala Trenker, Ortisei, Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Collection Museion, Bolzano. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo
Coming to prominence among a generation of artists working in Berlin in the 1990s, Judith Hopf has been working with a diversity of media and supports, be they sculpture, film, drawing, performance or even stage design, as well as organising gatherings, such as the salons she arranged with fellow artists at the bookshop b_books in Kreuzberg, Berlin. Hopf works with everyday materials such as brick, concrete, glass, packaging, and straightforward manufacturing processes. Simple and often full of humour, her works invite viewers to rethink the matters and shapes that form our world as well as to imagine their potentiality to become something else.
One of her most well-known works, Flock of Sheep (2013) is an installation of concrete blocks cast from cardboard shipping boxes that the artist transformed into sheep by adding spindly steel legs and drawing on cartoonish faces. By adorning the sculptures with what she calls a “Saul Steinberg-esque” face, Hopf hoped to draw a parallel between the boxy sheep and the way that we ship our belongings in boxes as we blithely hop from place to place around the world—as docile in the global economy as sheep.
Judith Hopf, Flock of Sheep, 2016. Exhibition view of Sala Trenker, Ortisei, Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Collection Museion, Bolzano. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo