Judith Hopf's Silly, Yet Soulful, Sheep

Want to get a conversation started? Here’s what you need to know about Judith Hopf’s humorous No Title (2014) – edition of 20:

1. A doyenne of the Berlin art scene, Judith Hopf makes sculptures, installations, and videos that use soft, often cutesy absurdist humor to expose the anomie of contemporary life in the age of globalism and the Internet. 

2. This piece evolves from what might be Hopf’s most famous work: Flock of Sheep from the 2013 Liverpool Biennial, an installation of concrete blocks cast from cardboard shipping boxes that the artist transformed into sheep by adding spindly steel legs and drawing on cartoonish faces.

3. By adorning the sculptures with what she calls a “Saul Steinberg-esque” face, Hopf hoped to draw a parallel between the boxy sheep and the way that we ship our belongings in boxes as we blithely hop from place to place around the world—as docile in the global economy as sheep.

4. Of the piece, Hopf says “I really like the form of print—I do a lot of them, because they’re so nice to work with and you can do them by yourself.  This one has a sort of graffiti quality, and there's also a reference to Helen Levitt’s photographs of children’s chalk drawings in New York.”