Alexandra Hopf

Installations by Alexandra Hopf generate a feeling of dejà vu. This also applies to Musée des Chemises that – not just coincidentally – recalls Marcel Broodthaers' mise-en-scènes. A lettering of the exhibition's title and a painted monochrome surface with irregular outlines embellish the wall. Lined with potted palm trees a folding-screen, made of grained wood panels, cuts across the room. The panels display transparent reverse glass paintings, which visualize a cycle of disembodied images. They in turn bear likenesses, mounted on the panels like film sequences. The beginning was the original of a drawing by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Broodthaers, also a master of reference, captured the drawings in a 1964 film essay entitled Bruegel et Goya, journalistes. The stills from this film reproduced in his publication Cinéma served as templates for Alexandra Hopf´s reproductions on glass. The respective interpretations through the ages overlap and create something original again.

The referential setting of Alexandra Hopf's parade and imaginative (visual) seducement on the top floor of LRRH is the basement room at Burgplatz 12 in Düsseldorf. At this location Broodthaers installed the Cinéma section of his famous Musée d'Art Moderne, Département des Aigles between January 1971 and October 1972.

The immaterial shirts from Musée des Chemises materialize in the CUBE of LRRH as Chemise en scène. The dissolution of the boundaries between artworks, everyday objects and the world of goods is another playful reference to Broodthaers: The fabric pattern of the Unisex-edition by Alexandra Hopf refers directly to a shirt that Marcel Broodthaers wore in a 1971 Spiegel advertisement for van Laack. Blatantly ambigious and with ironic recourse - very Broodthaers brand - Alexandra Hopf creates a wearable manifesto for questioning pictures in principle: Ceci n´est pas un Broodthaers!

Birgit Laskowski

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