Deborah Schamoni

In her multifaceted work encompassing a wide range of media from sculpture to film and drawing, Judith Hopf often takes up forms from our industrial and technological environment. The concrete figure “Phone User 4 (outdoor)” at Blickachsen 14, for example, uses subtle humour to illustrate a pose that can often be observed in everyday life. Instead of gazing at the picturesque surroundings of the Kurpark, the figure is immersed in the screen of its cell phone, with which it forms an inseparable unit. The work “tire outdoor”, created for the exhibition – referring back to the invention of the wheel – is a monument to the air-filled tyre, a trivial object without which contemporary flows of people and goods would be unthinkable. The inclined position of the concrete tyre suggests rapid movement on the one hand, and the loss of speed at the moment before tipping over, on the other. Both works subtly reflect aspects of our consumer behaviour in an increasingly accelerated world.

Judith Hopf, who was already represented at Blickachsen 13, studied at the art academies in Bremen and Berlin. She has been invited internationally to numerous major solo and group exhibitions, such as documenta (2012), and has been a professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt since 2008.

Blickachsen is an exhibition of contemporary sculpture and site-specific installations by leading as well as promising international artists which takes place throughout the summer every two years in the historical parks of Bad Homburg and other locations throughout the Rhine-Main region.

The title of this unique series of exhibitions is inspired by the “visual axes” (Blickachsen) created by Peter Joseph Lenné in the garden architecture of Bad Homburg's Kurpark in the mid-19th century.
 
Photos: © Archiv Stiftung Blickachsen, Bad Homburg.