Deborah Schamoni

Deborah Schamoni is pleased to present a curated dialogue between Judith Hopf and Nicole Wermers at Artissima 2025 – two artists who stand among the most distinctive voices of their generation. With professorships at art academies, exhibitions in international institutions, and works held in major museum collections, they have profoundly shaped contemporary sculpture and influenced a younger generation of artists. Their approach is marked by reflection, precision, and an unpretentious clarity.

Both artists grew up in West Germany in the 1970s. With a sharp and observant eye, they both examine the visual language of everyday life, the structures of urban and in-between spaces, their design, and the mechanisms of social organization. From the seemingly familiar, they create a visual vocabulary that subtly unsettles while remaining poetically concise. From a female perspective, they dissect an environment still shaped by male dominance and hierarchical order. Both artists question the taken-for-granted and open a view onto the subtexts of contemporary life. Through their respective forms of deconstruction, Hopf and Wermers reveal the social and political meanings embedded in material, surface, and form.

While Nicole Wermers develops her works from observations of urban spaces shaped by economic conditions and their relation to the (female) body, her sculptures often arise from the productive friction and combination of industrial materials and forms, which she collages and adapts in unorthodox ways, thereby suspending their functionality. Through precisely placed ruptures, tensions emerge between utility and uselessness, directing attention to the social and aesthetic codes of modern life and exposing the hierarchies of materials and objects within shared spaces.

Judith Hopf, by contrast, turns her gaze to the relationship between nature and technology, body and system. Her sculptures – often made from simple materials such as brick or concrete – explore the humanization of objects and the poetic as well as comical aspects of the digital. Through subtle shifts and humorous interventions, she transforms the familiar into something unseen, something strange; yet, because it remains familiar, it provokes reflection and new insight. Hopf animates things, pointing to the veins and fine cracks that run through both material and society.

In the dialogue between these two artists, a shared terrain emerges – one in which the figurative begins to surface, the material object starts to waver, and the everyday is transformed into something exceptional.