‘By melting our individual cores we will achieve a massive release of beautiful energy.’ - hobbypopMUSEUM
Eastside Projects proudly presents a new solo exhibition by Düsseldorf and London-based artist group hobbypopMUSEUM formed by Sophie von Hellermann, Christian Jendreiko, Matthias Lahme, Dietmar Lutz, André Niebur and Marie-Céline Schäfer.
hobbypopMUSEUM believe strongly that in artistic collaboration lies something other than compromise, something uniquely valuable. As a group they have created potent site-specific installations, fusing painting with sound, performance and film, since 1998 when they formed in Düsseldorf. Continuing to provoke through a careful balance of antagonism and sincerity, romantic optimism and painterly faux-naivety hobbypopMUSEUM are injecting Eastside Projects with ‘strategy and heart’ as the artists themselves have described their own modus operandi.
For two weeks prior to the exhibition opening, all six members of the group will be making new work within the situation of the gallery. hobbypopMUSEUM installations can be seen as textures woven out of figures linked together by iconographic and formal criteria. Their arsenal of figures spans histories of painting, drawing, photo, film and sound to words, performance, sculpture and architecture. Which form the figures take, depends on a basic confrontation with the conditions of site and chemistry of the group. Eschewing the socio-political agenda typically associated with collective artmaking hobbypopMUSEUM stake their identity on the theatrics of fantasised scenarios and the strong narrative trail or journey through their exhibitions and happenings as a long-term ‘fight for ideas’.
This new commission is then a station on this journey, following on from recent gatherings in San Francisco and Enschede, Holland. They travel, meet up, disperse and reconvene for exhibitions all over the world, leaving a thread of narrative behind discerned through their titles and slogans over the years - hobbypop rockt das haus, keanu reeves & white cube, momus & morrissey & melville, Baader-Meinhof, London Onion Development, Wind is When Empty Coke Cans Start Singing, Theory of Everything, Welcome to Normal, Neo Psychico and GAMMA GAMMA - the hardest working group in the art business!
hobbypopMUSEUM’s hometown of Düsseldorf is coloured by significant marks in art history, from the academy where Beuys once preached his message of “art-as-life-as-myth” to the city that nurtured the masters of postwar German painting: Polke and Richter. A generation later hobbypopMUSEUM are permitted to ‘play’ with this legacy of divergent narratives, making magnificent, elusive paintings that are simultaneously self-aware and self-abnegating.
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