Deborah Schamoni

Over the years, Judith Hopf has constructed her own special language, grounded precisely in the exploration and acceptance of one’s own limitations within a given system: Hopf’s art objects often point to the possibility of failure. In her three-dimensional work, humour becomes a way of dismantling the language of modernity, and this task is often assigned to animals, which at times become anthropomorphic.
Her most recent three-dimensional works are made of brick, taking on shapes that allude to certain physical experiences through a sort of visual paradox or oxymoron: a football, hand, or trolley case is rendered immobile, frozen in place by its weight and solidity.
Using medicine packages, Hopf has created Ravens that are then remodeled in porcelain. A parody of “birdwatching”, here the observed becomes the observer, turning the viewers into an integral part of the spectacle. With their downward faces, the Exhausted Vases allude to the state of exhaustion of our achievement oriented society. The many possibilities one is offered seem to exhaust the subject; but one can also be exhausted because all possibilities have been exhausted.

In Aileen Murphy’s Mildred Rasher Bean two fists push upwards defiantly against a bean shaped head – clenched fists meet the receptively soft flesh of the face. Mouth agape and bellowing, the eyelids recede into the depths of the eye sockets encouraged by a small hook. There is a sense of anticipation, tension and a growing mania. Murphy’s large-scale compositions seem to capture the point at which these figures reach a fit of pique then fragment. Aileen Murphy’s canvases are lurid and brassy with strong sweeping brush strokes that evoke activity and dance. Energy takes precedence as the painted image is contained but always threatens to breach the border of the canvas, a yellow interior emblazoned by broad swathes of blue paint depicts an athletically contorted woman mid-pirouette or falling. Murphy works from swiftly made drawings creating seamless gestures of movement. They are ‘feeling’ rather than ‘ thinking’ paintings that are concerned with human emotion and the human condition in which tales of drama and lust abound.

Text: “Within and Without” by Ingrid Lyons