Martin Ebner

FONDAZIONE MUSEION.
Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea
Piazza Piero Siena 1
39100 Bolzano, Italia

Opening 30/09/2016, 7 pm
01/10/2016 – 08/01/2017

Museion presents Judith Hopf’s first solo show in an Italian museum.

Hopf occupies a unique position within the globalized, hyper-connected art world. With her signature playful spirit, she sets about deconstructing certainties and undermining social parameters and conventions. Her ironic, self-deprecating works explore her awareness of her own limits and relish in the awkward and the clumsy. She revels in slapstick, and applies a deliberately amateurish aesthetic, basing her pieces on the simplest of materials.

The exhibition Up, which occupies the Passage area and the fourth floor of the museum, presents thirty works by the artist, including videos, sculptures and drawings, many of which have been produced for the show and forge a dialogue with the venue and its surrounding landscape. The relationship with the South Tyrol landscape can also be seen on the invitation for the exhibition, designed by the artist herself.
In the artist’s sculptures humour is deployed to subvert the language of modernity, and she often uses animals as a sort of symbolic and conceptual medium to convey human practices. In this sense the flock of concrete sheep with funny faces sketched on with charcoal pokes fun at the conventions of minimalist sculpture, its serial nature and intentional absence of associations and content, but also lampoons the behaviour of visitors to contemporary art exhibitions.
Hopf’s latest sculptures are in brick and allude to limitations of physical experience, in the form of a visual oxymoron or paradox: a foot, football and trolley bag so heavy and solid that their motion is frozen into place.

In the Museion show existing works mingle with new pieces created for the occasion. Bricks are not only used in sculptures, but also architectural modules that create the layout of the exhibition; these divide up the space and at the same time serve as supports for some of the works.

Born in Karlsruhe in 1969, the artist teaches figurative arts at the Frankfurter Städelschule and has exhibited in institutions including the PRAXES Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2014), Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2013), Malmö Konsthall, Malmö (2012) and international events such as documenta 13, Kassel (2012) and the Liverpool Biennial (2014). Her works have been presented at numerous festivals, including the Berlin International Film Festival (the Berlinale), and the “Internationalen Kurzfilmtagen Oberhausen”.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Mousse Publishing in three languages (It/Ger/Eng) with texts by Roberto Pinto and Letizia Ragaglia, and an interview with the artist by Sabeth Buchmann.