Rebecca Horn (1944)
Germany
Biography :
"Born in 1944 in Michelstadt (Germany) - lives and works in Berlin and Paris
It was at the age of twenty, in 1964, that Rebecca Horn joined the Hamburg School of Fine Arts, from which she graduated in 1970.
From 1968, she participated in body art events. She then combines minimalism and kinetic art to construct a conceptual and self-referenced work. In 1972, she participated in documenta 5 in Cassel. His first solo exhibition took place in 1973 in Berlin.
A retrospective exhibition by Rebecca Horn was conceived in 1993 in New York (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Museum) then traveled to Europe in 1994-95: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Tate Gallery and Serpentine Gallery, London; then in France, at the Grenoble Museum in 1995.
Rebecca Horn's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in major international institutions and has received numerous awards and distinctions (Barnett and Annalee Newman Award, 2004, for example). In 2019-20, a retrospective in dialogue with the Center Pompidou-Metz and the Tinguely Museum in Basel is dedicated to him.
Rebecca Horn's art is part of the context in which it was born, that of performance, Body Art and video, and the heritage of Dadaism and Surrealism. The lung disease she suffered from the toxic vapors of the polyester resins she used for her sculptures, then her stay in a sanatorium in 1968, were the catalysts for an art marked by the urgency to communicate. His work is therefore first characterized by an obsession with the body, its protection in a cocoon of flexible materials, or its sublimation, notably thanks to feathers.
The artist then evolves towards less intimate, increasingly monumental installations, where all kinds of machines play the leading role. It is thus part of a long tradition of the art of the machine and the inanimate object, animal or natural, and the “mechanics” of fluids: feathers, gloves, mirrors, pistols, hammers, shoes, suitcases, binoculars, paintbrushes, wheelchairs, butterfly wings, eggs, snakes, beetles, sulfur, water, mercury. Like her plastic work, Rebecca Horn's cinema shows the attention she pays to rhythm, the coordination of movement and the automation of the body.
Entirely inhabited by the personal story of the artist, Rebecca Horn's work gives primacy to experience. If it mixes numerous references – literary, alchemical, sexual, cinematographic, etc. – and has a strong allegorical dimension, it remains attached to the living subject and the potential of its body, its energy, its extensions, its rituals, its metamorphoses."
(Source, website, Contemporary art institute of Villeurbanne)