She had been very withdrawn in recent years and Rebecca Horn could not attend the opening of the comprehensive retrospective at Haus der Kunst. That was in April. She did not give any interviews and was not feeling well, people around her said. This important German artist died on Friday evening at the age of 80.
The award-winning artist has created a multifaceted and multi-layered body of work, including sculpture, installation, and performance, as well as literary texts, scripts, and even film and opera productions.
Originally from Hesse, she became famous for her magical art machines. She made objects such as suitcases, violins, and tubes move mysteriously. One of her most famous works is the ‘Turtle Sighing Tree’, whose bells produce a mournful tone.
Rebecca Horn, Body Augmentation with ‘Prosthetics’
The daughter of a merchant from the Odenwald was planning to take over the family business, but chose the more difficult path at the male-dominated art academy. The fact that she immediately gave the unicorn was a great feminine tip for starting out in Hamburg, and ultimately became a principle.
Rebecca Horn “extended” her own body with beautiful regularity: one-meter-long “glove fingers” that could be used as garbage tongs, wings like those worn by a tailor from Ulm for flight tests, headbands made of plastic tubes, feather masks or very long “unicorns” – all created for performance, above all, to promote the perception of one’s own body and determine the artist’s early work.
At some point, these materials take on a life of their own, and when pointe shoes dance on wire poles, you automatically think of a ballerina. The engine has long since found its central position since the 80s.
Her family’s factory has a horn Transformed into an art center
These “alternative” devices were certainly not the result of a love of technology, but rather a game with the potential to outsource something, to observe it, to become clearer about it, and perhaps to grasp the fleeting nature of existence.
In 1989, the shy red-haired artist took up a professorship at the Berlin University of the Arts. Since 2007, she has expanded her family’s Odenwald factory into an art center. In 1993, she had a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and has since traveled around Europe. Major international institutions have given her solo exhibitions. In 2010, Horn was awarded one of the world’s most prestigious art awards, the Praemium Imperiale in Japan. Nothing could be more possible.
The ‘Rebecca Horn’ show at Haus der Kunst will be on view until October 13, 2024, with a public symposium on her life’s work taking place the day before.
