Judith Hopf

The blade of grass: monumental in scale - 3,50 meters tall - it’s realized in pressed steel and finished with a may-green powder coating. The industrial production process and the extreme enlargement confers a sense of abstraction on this sculptural object. With his towering height, the grass blade draw our attention to an omnipresent, but vastly overlooked botanical specimen. Grasses, sprouting abundantly on our planet for the past 55 million years, are arguably one of the most successful plant families, occurring in almost all ecosystems, with an extraordinary capacity to colonize, persist and transform environments.

Due to its relevance for mammalian herbivory, grass assumed a fundamental role in the agricultural revolution during the Neolithic period. Forest clearance, one of the earliest man-made modifications of the natural environment, provided pastures for cattles, shortly followed by the introduction of fencing systems, leading to the appearance of property ownership, domestication of animals, collection of natural resources and the arising of ‘cultural landscapes’. In more recent centuries, cultivated grass became a constant presence on the pleasure grounds of the modern man: in the gardens of Renaissance villas and Baroque castles, in the 18th century Jardin à l’anglais and in the carefully trimmed lawns adorning suburban middle-class houses of the 20th century.

But the artist’s Blade of Grass is clearly not available for human use. By sheer size, is placed out of our control, and being forced to look up we are obliged to revise our scale of values of what we normally consider to be great and important.