Eastside Projects

An artist-run space as public gallery

for the City of Birmingham

hobbypopMUSEUM
Launch: 6-9pm Friday 7th May 2010
8 May – 12 June 2010

‘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.

Eastside Projects 86 Heath Mill Lane, Birmingham, B9 4AR, UK

Contact 0121-771-1778 info@eastsideprojects.org www.eastsideprojects.org

Free Entry: Open Thursday 12-6.30pm, Friday to Saturday 12-5pm

Eastside Projects is a not for profit company Limited by guarantee reg: 6402007, in partnership with Birmingham City
University and Revenue Funded by Arts Council England West Midlands. Extra support from Business Link West Midlands
and Future Jobs Fund.