Judith Hopf. Stepping Stairs

Judith Hopf. Stepping Stairs
10.02.2018 - 15.04.2018

Since the 1990s, the Berlin-based artist Judith Hopf has mastered an independent artistic language that unswervingly manages to stake out new ground, be it in the form of sculpture, film, drawing, performance or stage design. Her iconic works are deeply rooted in the use of everyday materials, like brick, concrete, glass, packaging, and easily graspable manufacturing processes, employing them to investigate the social dynamics of our built environment and their influence on behaviour, power dynamics and social codes. For her exhibition Stepping Stairs at KW, Hopf continues her engagement with the material bricks. The stone-masoned brick works occupy a curious intermediary position that fluctuates between sculpture and (exhibition)-architecture, both dividing and augmenting the exhibition space. The brick works will be presented alongside older works, including a reworked constellation of her laptop sculptures. Abstract figures in different everyday poses appear to be seamlessly merged with the laptops they balance on their waists and knees. Shaped by what appears to be an over-use of technology, the sculptures assume a hybrid form situated somewhere between laptop and human being.

Alongside the sculptural works, the exhibition at KW will include a new short film as well as an ambitious commission for the facade in KW’s courtyard. In these commissioned works, two historic artists have served as sources of inspiration: the American architect and architectural theorist John Hejduk (1929–2000), and the German artist Annette Wehrmann (1961–2010). Wehrmann’s installation of Serpentine Streamer Texts will be on view alongside an audio recording of her reading of the texts on the third floor at KW from February 10 until March 11, 2018. A comprehensive reader will be published with Verlag Walther König, featuring contributions by Hopf as well as by central companions of her work. The exhibition is curated by Anna Gritz.