To West Africa on a merchant ship – and other journeys by the artist Elke Hopfe

Elke Hopfe (*1945) travelled as early as during her studies, which she began in 1965 at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden (HfBK), to destinations including Leningrad, where she explored the works of Matisse and Picasso. Further journeys took her to other socialist countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. An extraordinary experience came in 1976 when she was able to travel to West Africa on a merchant ship together with Heinz-Detlef Moosdorf. The ship called at numerous European and African ports, enabling Hopfe to see many places and visit numerous museums.

In the interview with “Art in Networks”, she also speaks of the role that Willi Sitte played; as president of the Verband Bildender Künstler, he increasingly facilitated trips to exhibitions in the West. Hopfe travelled, for example, to West Berlin for the major Giacometti retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie in 1987.

In 1988, Elke Hopfe began teaching at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden (HfBK). She describes the political changes at the university in 1989–90 as a challenge. Despite her international travel experiences, leaving her homeland permanently was never an option for Elke Hopfe. She has deep roots in Dresden, where she continues to live and work as a freelance artist to this day.

In her artistic work, Elke Hopfe focuses on the human being as an individual. Her aim is not to produce a realistic depiction of what she sees. Rather, the artist concentrates on the subject’s personality and her own feelings towards the model. The artist consciously decides which characteristics are key to the psychological profile of the person being portrayed. She emphasises certain traits whilst deliberately omitting others. Through this subjective representation, she encourages viewers to question their own visual habits and motivates them to look closely and repeatedly. Another defining feature of her work is her choice of material. To this day, she uses large-format paper from former GDR stocks as her medium. Owing to their specific texture – being less heavily sized and almost porous – these papers actively contribute to the creative process of the drawings and lend them a sense of tension.

This article was produced as part of a seminar at TU Dresden, led by Prof. Kerstin Schankweiler and Laura-Maria Schulze, with the collaboration of Pia Zuchold, Lisa Junghans and Kirsten Förster.