Biography

Since the beginning of the 1970s, Rebecca Horn, who was born in the Odenwald region, created an oeuvre that has developed into an ever-growing stream of performances, films, sculptural spatial installations, drawings, and photo-overpaintings. The distinctiveness of this body of work lies in the highly precise physical and technical functionality with which the artist stages her sculptures and their sequences of movement within space.

In her early performances, the body extensions, she explored the balance between human being and space. In her later spatial compositions, she replaced the human body with minimally acting kinetic sculptures. In her more recent works, entirely immaterial, she opens up the energetic field of a space through mirror reflections, light, and music.

Found objects and self-constructed items such as violins, suitcases, batons, ladders, pianos, metronomes, feather fans, small metal hammers, black water basins, space-connecting spiral drawing devices, large funnels, and pumping stations form the building blocks of kinetic sculptures that are released from their defined materiality and transformed into an immaterial metaphorics of constant transformation. In this way, they offer the viewer the possibility of associating mythical images and establishing links to cultural history, literature, and intellectual traditions.

At the same time, her work is held together by a distinctive and consistent logic. Each new work seems to develop rigorously from the previous one. Elements may reappear, yet in different contexts they are transformed and appear entirely new.

Thus, following the bodily experiences of her performances with body extensions, masks, and feather garments in the 1970s, her first kinetic sculptures appeared in films such as The Gigolo (1978) and La Ferdinanda (1981): The Gentle Prisoner (1978) and The Peacock Machine (1979/82).

In the 1980s and 1990s, she created large-scale spatial works that took historically and politically charged places as their point of departure. With her kinetic sculptures, the artist now laid bare the wounds of these places, for example in The Backward Concert (1997) in Münster and Tower of the Nameless (1994) in Vienna. In Weimar, Concert for Buchenwald was created in 1999. In Mirror of the Night (1998), installed in an abandoned synagogue near Cologne, she employed the energy of writing as a form of weaving against the forgetting of history.

Working with energy can also mean visualizing the turbulences of passion as spatial magnetic currents, as in High Moon (1991) in New York or El Rio de la Luna (1992) in Barcelona.

In later works, atmospheric energies such as sound structures or voices are transformed into a new immateriality of space. Examples include Moon Mirror (Palma de Mallorca, 2003), the outdoor installation Spiriti di Madreperla (Naples, 2002), and Light Imprisoned in the Belly of the Whale (2002).

Rebecca Horn’s works were presented in solo exhibitions at leading international institutions, including Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (1981), MOCA Los Angeles (1990), the Guggenheim Museum New York (1993), the National Gallery Berlin (1994), the Serpentine Gallery London (1994), the Tate Gallery London (1994), and the Kestner Gesellschaft Hannover (1997).

Photographers

Ute Perrey
Achim Thode
Film still
Attilio Maranzano
Heinz Hefele
Peppe Avallone