Internationally she has long been considered a leading figure in modern art, but in Germany her fame came later. Rebecca Horn has died at the age of 80. Their magical art machine will be remembered.
Artist Rebecca Horn died Friday evening at the age of 80, said Peter Lau, president of the Moontower Foundation, which Horn founded.
Horn was one of the most important artists of our time. The award-winning artist created a multifaceted and complex body of work that included literary texts, sculptures, installations, and performances. She also wrote screenplays and directed films and operas.
The Hessian native has made her mark on the memory with her poetic, enigmatic and complex work. Whether her early feather-trimmed gowns and corset dresses, noise machines or politically charged spatial installations, her work always leaves the viewer with a sense of emotion and a space where the imagination can go on a journey.
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Born in Michelstadt in the Odenwald in 1944, Horn studied in Hamburg and London. Until 1981, she lived and worked mainly in New York, and later in Paris. In 1989, she 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.
Horn began his artistic career while he was hospitalized for two years while studying. To cope with the isolation following severe pneumonia and the death of his parents, Horn began writing and drawing. The human body, Eros and death, violence and sorrow became his leitmotifs.
Horn created a magical art machine.
Horn became famous for his magical art machines that made objects like suitcases, violins, and tubes move mysteriously. One of his most famous works is the “Turtle Sighing Tree”, which rings bells in various languages.
“In my exhibitions and films, people become part of my photographs,” said Horn, who turned 70. “They move, and my sculptures move too. And then suddenly they meet in the rotating mirror and become part of this artistic process.”
In 1993, she was given a major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in the United States, and later traveled around Europe as a traveling exhibition. There have been over 100 solo exhibitions of her work worldwide, from New York to London, Paris to Tokyo, including the Martin-Gropius-Bau exhibition in Berlin in 2006. Her numerous awards include the Praemium Imperiale in Japan in 2010, one of the world’s most prestigious art awards.
Hon is in a wheelchair after suffering a stroke.
In 2007 she also became fully active privately. In Bad König in southern Hesse, she was able to buy back her family’s former property through her father’s factory. She founded the Moontower Foundation in place of her childhood, which, in addition to preserving her own work, has the primary task of supporting young artists.
“Breathing Body as Life Cycle” was the name of one of Horn’s last exhibitions in 2017. In retrospect, one particularly poignant piece is the bronze impression of her shoe, in which a two-metre-tall brass rod lurches motionlessly. The jury of the Wilhelm Lembruck Prize named her “one of the most distinctive, innovative and experimental artists in Germany.” After suffering a stroke in 2015, Horn was confined to a wheelchair.
She told dpa news agency in a birthday interview that she was not afraid of death.
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