Deborah Schamoni

Judith Hopf is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary German art. Born in Karlsruhe in 1969 and based in Berlin, since the 1990s she has developed an artistic language that is difficult to compare with any other: Hopf’s work is laconic and layered, materially grounded and conceptually precise, earnest in its diagnosis and unmistakably dry in its humor. Her work is held in major international collections and has been shown extensively – from the Hamburger Bahnhof, the New Museum in New York to Tate Modern in London, from dOCUMENTA in Kassel to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Since 2008 she has held a professorship at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main – one of Europe's most influential art academies – before accepting a chair at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden in 2025.

Judith Hopf’s inclusion in a fair like this – spanning twenty years of practice – is anything but a given: Her practice consistently resists the logic of quick consumption, demanding instead slow looking, physical attentiveness, and a willingness to be disoriented.

Sculpture, film, drawing, performance, stage design – Hopf's formally wide-ranging practice circles around a single underlying question: how visible and invisible architectures, technologies, and everyday objects inscribe themselves into human behaviour and shape it. Her approach is never moralistic, but consistently analytical and oblique, carried by a humor that never softens its edge but instead estranges the familiar, making it newly visible.

Materials such as brick, concrete, clay, and glass are not mere vehicles for ideas but arguments in themselves. For Hopf, fired bricks carry an inherent Donald Judd-like quality, making them precisely the right medium for negotiating questions of standardization, corporeality, and the boundary between function and form. Trolley cases built from masonry that cannot move; vases that appear exhausted; laptops left waiting – Hopf endows the inanimate with psychological traits, not to humanize it but to turn the mirror around: what does it say about us that we recognize ourselves in these things?

A further, increasingly central strand of her work concerns the relationship between humans and nature – or more precisely, human exceptionalism and its undoing. Monumental blades of grass in pressed steel, trees whose growth ignores the edges of the picture plane: these works articulate a quiet but resolute resistance to the ideology of progress and the mastery of nature. Hopf works not with pathos but with a shift in scale – forced to look up at a blade of grass, one begins to question one's own categories of what is great and what matters.

The physical making of the works is no mere means to an end. Hopf insists – explicitly and without cynicism – on the craft process, on the slow accumulation that inscribes itself into the surface. The time of making remains legible in the object. To insist on physical precision is, today, a political stance.

The Phone Users (2021–22) are life-sized figures modelled from coarse clay. Ungainly and brittle, they appear deeply absorbed in their dependence on the device, lost in the coordinates of a bygone, anthropocentric world. The mobile phone here is the ultimate bodily prosthetic – returned, literally, to earth: body, hand, display, touchscreen – like the Golem, everything is clay, archaic material. The slow, manual labor of modelling is inscribed layer by layer into the surface, standing in deliberate contrast to the speed of digital communication. "The muteness of her Phone Users speaks volumes," Jake Brodsky has observed – and Jenny Nachtigall adds that these figures do not illustrate a critique of capitalism but embody an invitation: to pause, to change pace, to look differently.

Blade of Grass – the grass blade sculptures are monumental works in pressed steel, powder-coated in a vivid may-green, standing between 2.50 and 3.50 meters tall. The serial production process and extreme enlargement lend the banal an abstract dignity. Present in almost every ecosystem for 55 million years, grass underpinned the Neolithic agricultural revolution. Freed here from its invisibility, it becomes monument – not as romantic symbol of nature, but as an argument for the things we overlook.

An early classic from Hopf's repertoire, the Exhausted Vases (2006) – slender cylinders and rotund pitchers in beige clay on elegant white pedestals. The faces painted onto their surfaces, lifted from Saul Steinberg, smile and weep over their inner emptiness. “Objects with psychological quirks that remind us of ourselves – too unstable to pass as entirely self-confident works, too precise to be mere things,” writes Sabeth Buchmann. Exhaustion – in the double Beckettian sense, as condition and as the process of exhausting all possibilities – is here both subject and method.

Brick Works – the various groups of works made from serially produced, then artistically reworked bricks – represent Hopf's longstanding engagement with the standardized as artistic material. From the rigid, normalized volumes she carves pears, suitcases, feet, and hands, exposing the rift between function and figure, between minimalism and narrative, between the Duchampian readymade and the physically wrested object.

Mallorca offers Hopf's works a particularly resonant setting. Her Phone Users stand here as quiet figures of recognition – like visitors to the island, searching for signal. Mallorca is itself a lesson in the shift of scale, oscillating between deep-rooted landscape and the fleeting overlay of tourism. What reads as conceptual argument in an exhibition space gains here – under Mediterranean light – a different, more earthbound urgency. The things we overlook. The growth we cannot stop. The exhaustion we cannot name. Mallorca knows.

Text: Stephan Dillemuth