Hammer Projects: Judith Hopf at the Hammer Museum

The Berlin-based artist Judith Hopf uses humor and wit to address the politics of art making, group dynamics, and the impact of technology on perception and human experience. Through sculpture, drawing, video, and performance, Hopf playfully anthropomorphizes objects such as laptop computers or ceramic vases by adding facial features, hair, arms, or legs. By animating the inanimate, she imbues it with the potential for purpose and agency. In some works she makes quotidian objects out of absurdly counterintuitive materials, foregrounding the dissonance between a thing’s usual function and its elevation to the status of art. Basketballs and suitcases might be comprised of carved bricks, while pieces of rope and chain links hang and float as finished works that appear complete in their very incompleteness. Her funny, dreamlike video works set ridiculous scenarios against backdrops of everyday life: a girl floods her family’s apartment, a car momentarily flips on its side, and patients dressed like mummies dance to techno music in a hospital waiting room. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in California.