Hanni Rocco

At the age of eighty, Hanni Rocco started designing »display cases«. She combined colourful plastic birds, tin cans, dried flowers, magnifying glasses and much more besides into small scenes. Using simple means, commonplace artefacts such as souvenirs, everyday items and found objects become the protagonists in her scenes. Rocco studied the violin in Frankfurt, Zurich and Berlin from 1919. After living in Frankfurt (1918-1928), Berlin, at Lake Constance and abroad, she finally settled in Freiburg in 1953. She began her career as a self-taught artist in 1962 : she started to paint from the early 1970s and from 1976 onwards embarked on her display cases. One of the special features of these cases is the richness of relationships residing within them. Often the titles allude to people, artists or literary contents and reflect Hanni Rocco's critical view of her milieu and her artist role models.