The intensive collaboration with the artist in staging the show is already revealed in the first exhibition room. The museum’s partitions walls were alienated to resemble the undulations of a black moor. The homophone “moor”, to which the title of the exhibition alludes, symbolically stands for the superabundance into which we humans are in danger of gradually being bogged down.The displayed works reveal the broad spectrum of media the artist employs, ranging from installations and sculptures, such as the “Erschöpfte Vasen”, to films and graphics, like the anthropomorphous “Waiting Laptops”. The show features works from the past decade to the present. The earliest is the film “Türen” made in collaboration with Henrik Olesen in 2007. The series “Schlangen” – concrete casts of creatures with tongues and teeth made of printouts of email messages – and the video piece “More” were produced by Judith Hopf specifically for the show in Kassel and are on view in the Neue Galerie for the first time.
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The exhibition “Judith Hopf. MORE” was prompted by, among others things, the 60th anniversary of the documenta this year. Judith Hopf took on a special position at the dOCUMENTA (13) 2012 with her works at Kloster Breitenau and the control cell of the dOCUMENTA (13), the so-called “Brain”, in the Fridericianum. The three works from the series “Trying to Build a Mask” shown there were acquired by the Neue Galerie after the documenta. Judith Hopf created faces from typical present-day trash – packaging materials of modern communication devices – and had them transferred to 3D prints in an elaborate process. In the current show, they enter into a dialogue with two further masks.Her video piece “More” is also highly relevant to the present. Inspired by the film “Powers of Ten” by Ray and Charles Eames from 1977, the artist engages with Google Earth and the changes in perceiving the world that it has induced. Judith Hopf herself views this development in a critical way: “In the past years, I have increasingly thought about why I have the feeling of being less well informed – despite the supposedly better possibilities and more information. I fear that the apparent overview promised by the zoom-in and zoom-out modes of tablets and smartphones un-clarifies a differentiated worldview.”What characterises Judith Hop’s works besides current and socially explosive themes is a certain weird absurdity. The curator of the show and director of the Neue Galerie, Dr. Dorothee Gerkens, points out: “Judith Hopf’s artworks counter the ‘more’ in regard to expectations and information with idiosyncratic humour. Hopf subtly weaves her observations of society’s contradictions into her aesthetic work. The strong obstinacy that her works develop counters the pressure to conform in the society of control.”Curated by Dorothee GerkensText: Neue Galerie, KasselPhotos: Neue Galerie, Kassel
