Counter Balance – Scope for contrary movements

The exhibition "Counter Balance" presents an overview of the Ida Dehmel Art Prize winner's work, focussing on the years 2017 to 2024. Two earlier video works, "Balance" (2001) and "Individual Borders" (2003), presented on monitors in a 90s aesthetic, frame the current, image-rich videos, photographs, drawings and objects.

"For her works, Iris Hoppe draws on personal experience and critical reflection on herself and on social changes in an increasingly unbalanced "world without measure", as the philosopher Ralf Konersmann describes it in his book of the same name. She works site-specifically, with choreographed or spontaneously acting people, with technical devices and mass-produced objects, with found and hand-processed materials, with texts and musical works. She includes herself and family members as well as historical, mythical and religious elements and symbols. In ever new and unusual constellations, Iris Hoppe succeeds in opening up several levels of meaning via a multi-layered network of relationships that appear both timeless and contemporary."

"Counterbalancing the immoderate, increasingly unbalanced society by developing images, playful and precise, sensual and poetic, beautiful and sophisticated images, is an outstanding quality of Iris Hoppe's works. It does not begin with an abstract thought, but with an inner image that suddenly emerges from the subconscious of an artist who seismographically captures sensual impressions and feelings, who alertly registers and reflects on shifts in the individual and social balance. The next step is to scrutinise the still unclear image, check its viability and then develop a concept for it, through which it can unfold into a multi-layered work of art. Iris Hoppe balances out the mental concentration and technical challenge required for its realisation with expressive drawings in which she gives expression to spontaneous feelings."

"Either this value of a border will be created in any case, or today's excess will find its law and its peace only in general destruction."                             (Albert Camus, Man in Revolt, Paris 1951, quoted from Rowohlt TB, Reinbek, 1991, p. 239)

Text excerpts from the catalogue "Iris Hoppe Counter Balance" by Dr. Susannah Cremer-Bermbach, published by Verlag Kettler, ISBN 978-3-98741-132-8.

Iris Hoppe is this year's winner of the GEDOK Ida-Dehmel Art Prize.
A newly donated sponsorship prize was awarded to the artist Effrosyni Kontogeorgou. Her installation recording of the work Nephelokkokygia from 2022 will be shown.

The artist Effrosyni Kontogeorgou deals with poetic analogies and structures between different (living) spaces. In recent years she has worked intensively on issues of coexistence and the ambivalence between culture and nature. The video shown at the NKV was created during a site-specific walk-in installation in which 33 pigeons took over the Galerie Mitte in Bremen.