Rebecca Horn
(1944 - ) |
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Art Work
| Name: |
Rebecca Horn |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
Odenwald, Germany |
| Nationality: |
British |
| Birth: |
1944 |
| Death: |
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| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painting
Sculpture
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Biography
Her installations have been seen in the forbidding ruins of a prison tower in Munster, the Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpetriere in Paris, a Renaissance villa in Tuscany, the theatre of a Viennese asylum and an old primary school in Kassel. Born in 1944 in the southern German town of Michelstadt, Rebecca Horn alludes in her works to the mood of the space in which they are shown - be it a historic building, the neutral rooms of a gallery or a museum such as the National Gallery in London. When a retrospective of her work was held in New York's Guggenheim Museum, she said she wanted her sculptures to make the secret music of particular spaces audible.
For her 1992 installation El node la luna {River of the Moon) in a former hat factory in Barcelona, the artist had mercury flow through long, winding lead pipes and pumped into metal chambers representing the ventricles of a heart. They contained the keys to seven rooms in an old hotel with rooms to let by the hour and where the other part of the installation was on show. Horn had modified the rooms only sparingly and transformed them into the seven stations of an 'essay' on love. Partly in poetic and partly in dramatic terms, she made tenderness, romance and light-heartedness, but also aggression and isolation, the subject of her installation. In the 'Room of Lovers', for instance, tiny motors drove violins that had alighted on the walls and furniture like mechanical butterflies; in the 'Room of Air', wings made of red feathers moved up and down; in the 'Room of the Circle', a metal nail several meters in length scraped the walls; in the 'Room of Water', a bed suspended from the ceiling dripped liquid into glass funnels; and in the 'Room of Mutual Destruction', two movable pistols that were aimed at each other were installed in untidy beds in readiness for a fatal duel, in readiness for the 'Kiss of Death'.
As a student, Horn had lived for a time in Barcelona's cheap Hotel Peninsula. The installation she produced decades later is typical of her work, which often makes use of personal experience, but also takes its inspiration from the work of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys, the literature of lean-Paul Sartre and Franz Kafka or the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Federico Fellini.
In 1972, she was one of the youngest artists to participate in documenta V in Kassel; even her early performances that she showed there were inspired by personal experiences. As a twenty-one- year-old student at Hamburg School of Art, she severely damaged her lungs when working with polyester and fiberglass and she had to spend a long time recuperating in a sanatorium. Following this period of isolation, she began to investigate physical and spatial experiences in performances for which she made special objects such as extra-long gloves, feather masks or fans attached to and operated by her body. She made films and videos of her performances and, in 1978, also started to make feature films, such as Der Eintanzer (1978), La Ferdinanda (1981) or Buster's Bedroom (1990), in which she First used mechanical sculptures like the Peacock Machine or the tango-dancing table. Using electric motors, the artist gives inanimate objects a life of their own and has them perform actions that convey to the viewer the tension that exists between vulnerability and aggression. They are perpetual rituals of love, desire, hate and isolation.
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As you look up at Rebecca Horn's Concert for Anarchy, a grand piano suspended upside down from the ceiling, it suddenly drops, spilling out its keys with a clash of discordant notes. The piano slowly re-assembles itself, only to repeat the performance. Horn gives objects new life, assembling them in odd combinations, and animating them with motors. Her art develops out of that of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys in its marriage of objects and performance, and its play on eroticism and sensuality. But Horn's practice is also informed by her awareness of her position as a woman artist. She has even made a 'reply' to Duchamp's famous The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even, (or Large Glass) (1915-23, Philadelphia Museum of Art). In her Prussian Bride Machine (1985, private collection) the separation and dominance of Duchamp's bachelors is disrupted, Horn includes instead a 'female' group of white, stiletto-heeled shoes. And, unlike Duchamp and Beuys, the things Horn uses to make her work are often beautiful: musical instruments, feathers and butterfly wings.
Horn was born in Germany, and her work has been shaped by the legacy of the Nazi regime. In 1999 in Weimar she made a memorial to those who suffered and died in the concentration camps. Horns The colonies of bees undermining the moles' subversive effort through time - Concert for Buchenwald Part 1 and Part 2 represented terrible loss, mourning and memory with columns of ash, broken musical instruments, a haulage wagon once used in a camp which careered around driverless, empty beehives, and glass shattered by falling stones. Horn has also made a work dedicated to the victims of the recent conflict in the Balkans. Her Tower of the Nameless (1997) was constructed out of ladders and violins in Hanover's Kestner Gesellschaft.
Literary history has been the subject of several of Horn's installations. Orlando (1988, Tate) takes as its title the novel by Virginia Woolf in which the heroine changes sex over the course of the centuries. While Mme Bovary - that's me - says G. Flaubert (1997, Private Collection) consists of a glass case housing a copy of Flaubert's novel about the reckless love affair and suicide of a bored young housewife in provincial France. Flaubert famously identified with Emma Bovary, and the piece represents his struggle to bring her to life. It is splattered with ink spots, vivid representations of the frustrations and false starts the writer experiences. Next to the book are binoculars, which could be read as symbolizing Flaubert's acute powers of observation, and black feathers, which could be another reference to writing (the quill pen) or a reminder of funeral decorations and Emma Bovary's death, one of the most agonized in literary history. Horn exploits the sensuous sheen and delicacy of feathers in many of her works, but she is also aware of their potential menace. Black Widow (1988), a bundle of dark feathers, springs open like a trap.
Horn has also made a number of feature films, with actors including Geraldine Chaplin and Donald Sutherland. These show her mechanical objects in motion, sometimes interacting with people. La Ferdinanda: Sonata for a Medici Villa (1981) includes a great mechanical fan of white peacock feathers slowly and elegantly unfurling in an empty room. Buster's Bedroom {1990), the story of a young woman's visit to the hospital where the movie star Buster Keaton was committed for alcohol abuse, features a wheelchair with the sinister power to pump whisky into its occupant. Some of Horn's machines have even taken over the role of the artist, drawing or painting. The Little Painting School Performs a Waterfall (1988) is made up of brushes mounted on metal arms, which regularly dip into cups of acrylic paint, and splatter it onto the gallery wall.
Referring to her mechanized objects as 'melancholic actors performing in solitude'. Horn summons up the pathetic aspect of objects that appear to be almost alive, but are trapped in meaningless movement, and of our own alienation in an increasingly mechanized world. Horn has often returned to the subject of the incursion of the technological and scientific into the biological. An early piece, Overflowing Blood Machine (1970), featured a naked man encased in lines of plastic tubing through which red liquid, symbolizing his blood, pulsed. And Horn has also linked her own practice as an artist, the magic she works when she transforms innate objects into moving things, with alchemy, by using the raw materials of the alchemist coal, mercury and sulphur-
When she began her career in the early 1970s {after training at the Hamburg Academy and St Martin's School of Art) Horn was a performance artist. She used props to extend the body's sensory perceptions: long artificial fingers enabled the wearer to touch two walls of a room simultaneously, a 'unicorn' horn worn on the top of the head altered the sense of the body's height, and wings of layered feathers folded over the eyes, or enveloped the body. Like a number of other women practitioners of the time, Horn was interested in representing the experiencing body, and stimulating senses other than sight moving away from the representation of the female body as object or spectacle. The body of work she has built since then questions our understanding of our place in the world. |
Samples of Work
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