Isa Genzken (born 27 November 1948) is a German artist who lives and works in Berlin. Her primary media are sculpture and installation, using a wide variety of materials, including concrete, plaster, wood and textile. She also works with photography, video, film and collage.[1]
Upon graduating in 1977, Genzken taught sculpture at the academy. She married German visual artist Gerhard Richter in 1982 and moved to Cologne in 1983. The couple separated in 1993[5] and Genzken moved back to Berlin.
Genzken has bipolar disorder,[3] goes through manic and depressive phases and has spent time in psychiatric hospitals.[7] She has frequently undergone treatment for substance abuse.[2] In an 2016 interview, she said that her alcohol problems began after her divorce and that she had been sober since 2013.[7]
Genzken has worked in studios in Düsseldorf, Cologne (designed in 1993 by architect Frank Tebroke);[8] for short stretches in the United States, in Lower Manhattan and Hoboken, New Jersey;[3] and currently in Berlin.[5]
Work
Although Isa Genzken's primary focus is sculpture, she has produced various media including photography, film, video, works on paper, works on canvas with oil, collages, collage books, film scripts, and even a record. Her diverse practice draws on the legacies of Constructivism and Minimalism and often involves a critical, open dialogue with Modernist architecture and contemporary visual and material culture. Genzken's diverse work also keeps her from being predictable in her work. Despite Genzken's diverse work, much of her practice still maintains conventions of traditional sculpture. Using plaster, cement, building samples, photographs, and bric-a-brac, Genzken creates architectonic structures that have been described as contemporary ruins. She further incorporates mirrors and other reflective surfaces to literally draw the viewer into her work. Genzken also uses location placement methods to inflict emotions into her sculptor viewers by making her viewers physically move out of the way of Genzken's sculptor due to the placement of the sculptor.[9] The column is a recurring motif for Genzken, a "pure" architectural trope on which to explore relationships between "high art" and the mass-produced products of popular culture.[10]
In the 1970s, Genzken began working with wood that she carved into unusual geometric shapes such as hyperboloids and ellipsoids.[2] In the photographs of her Hi-Fi-Serie (1979), she reproduced advertisements for stereo phonographs.[11]
In 1980, Genzken and Gerhard Richter were commissioned to design the König-Heinrich-Platz underground station in Duisburg; it was completed in 1992. Between 1986 and 1992, Genzken conceived her series of plaster and concrete sculptures to investigate architecture. These sculptures consist of sequentially poured and stacked slabs of concrete featuring rough openings, windows and interiors.[12] A later series consists of other architectural or interior design quotations made from epoxy resin casts, such as column or lamp sculptures.[11] In 1986, Genzken's architectural references switched from the 1910s, 20s and 30s to the 1950s, 60s and 70s.[13] In 1990 she installed a steel frame, Camera (1990) on a Brussels gallery's rooftop, offering a view of the city below.[14] In 2000, a series of architectural models roughly patched together, was inscribed with Fuck the Bauhaus. Later, in the series New Buildings for Berlin, which was shown at Documenta 11, Genzken designed architectural visions of glass high-rises.
The project entitled Der Spiegel 1989-1991 is a series of images comprising 121 reproductions of black and white photographs selected and cut from German newsweekly Der Spiegel. Presented in a non-sequential but methodical manner, each image is glued against a piece of white card and individually mounted in a simple frame. Whilst the images themselves remain caption-less, the dates in the series' titles offer clues about the artist's intentions.[15]
Her paintings of suspended hoops, collectively entitled MLR (More Light Research) (1992), recall gymnastics apparatus caught mid-swing and frozen in time.[16]
Starting in 1995, while in New York for several months, Genzken created a three-volume collage book entitled I Love New York, Crazy City (1995–1996),[11] a compendium of souvenirs from her various stays in the city, including photographs of Midtown's architecture, snapshots, maps, hotel bills, nightclub flyers, and concert tickets, among others.[17]
Rose (1993), in front of Leipziger Messe, Leipzig, Germany
One of Genzken's best known works, Rose (1993/7), is a public sculpture of a single long-stemmed rose made from enamelled stainless steel that towers eight metres above the Leipzig fairgrounds. The artist's first public artwork in the United States, her replica Rose II (2007) was installed outside the New Museum as part of a year-long rotating installation in November 2010.[18]
Genzken has also produced numerous films, including Zwei Frauen im Gefecht, 1974, Chicago Drive, 1992,[12]Meine Großeltern im Bayerischen Wald, 1992, and the video Empire/Vampire, Who Kills Death, 2003.[19]
As an artist she published five portfolio styled books. Each including her expressive work, they can be purchased under David Zwirners Books website. Her books include Sculpture as a World Receiver, October Files, Isa Genzken: Retrospective, Isa Genzken: Oil, and Isa Genzken.
Since the end of the second half of the 1990s, Genzken has been conceptualizing sculptures and panel paintings in the shape of a bricolage of materials taken from DIY stores and from photographs and newspaper clippings.[20] She often uses materials that underline the temporary character of her works. As part of her deep-set interest in urban space, she also arranges complex, and often disquieting, installations with mannequins, dolls, photographs, and an array of found objects. New Buildings for New York are assembled from found scraps of plastic, metal and pizza-box cardboard.[21] The assemblages from the Empire/Vampire, Who Kills Death series, originally comprising more than twenty sculptures that were created following the attacks of September 11, are combinations of found objects – action figures, plastic vessels, and various elements of consumer detritus – arranged on pedestals in architecturally inspired, post-destruction scenes.[22]Elefant (2006) is a column of cascading vertical blinds festooned with plastic tubes, foil, artificial flowers, fabric and some tiny toy soldiers and Indians.[23] For her installation Oil, the artist transformed the German Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale into a futuristic and morbid Gesamtkunstwerk.
Genzken worked frequently with Zwiner, who held her Paris New York Exhibition from August 29-October 10 in 2020. She had five solo exhibitions with him and this last one was her fifth. She has worked with him since 2010. The exhibition included Genzken's early work at the Kunstmuseum Basel. The installation of Genzken's recent "tower" sculptures. It was inspired by the artists decades-long fascination with architecture and urban skylines. She used multiple forms that include, vertical structures, of medium-density fiberboard with inclusion of a mirror foil, spray paint as well as other media.
Genzken's impact
Genzken's work has undoubtedly impacted art culture through her unique ability to create sculptures out of many materials such as wood, plaster, concrete, steel, epoxy resin, and even household kitchen materials, as seen in her "Babies" semblance from 1997. Genzken redefined the art of creating sculptures and even combated discrimination against sculpture art in the 60s and 70s as she pursued her unique talent. Simply put, her work has been seen as an attempt to encourage and broaden the art of sculpture without eliminating it. Genzken's art and media have always stayed true to the logic of her work, which continues to be contradictory, unpredictable, and in opposition throughout the sculpture. Her sculptures have even been recognized as art that creates illusions with the mind and opens the imagination of the viewer.[24]
Wolfgang Tillmans is a German photographer. His diverse body of work is distinguished by observation of his surroundings and an ongoing investigation of the photographic medium’s foundations.
Gerhard Richter is a German visual artist. Richter has produced abstract as well as photorealistic paintings, and also photographs and glass pieces. He is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary German artists and several of his works have set record prices at auction, with him being the most expensive living painter at one time.
The Whitechapel Gallery is a public art gallery in Whitechapel on the north side of Whitechapel High Street, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The original building, designed by Charles Harrison Townsend, opened in 1901 as one of the first publicly funded galleries for temporary exhibitions in London. The building is a notable example of the British Modern Style. In 2009 the gallery approximately doubled in size by incorporating the adjacent former Passmore Edwards library building. It exhibits the work of contemporary artists and organizes retrospective exhibitions and other art shows.
Opened in 2003, the Nasher Sculpture Center is a museum in Dallas, Texas, that houses the Patsy and Raymond Nasher collection of modern and contemporary sculpture. It is located on a 2.4-acre (9,700 m2) site adjacent to the Dallas Museum of Art in the Dallas Arts District.
Martin Kippenberger was a German artist known for his extremely prolific output in a wide range of styles and media, superfiction as well as his provocative, jocular and hard-drinking public persona.
Elizabeth Joy Peyton is an American contemporary artist working primarily in painting, drawing, and printmaking. Best known for figures from her own life and those beyond it, including close friends, historical personae, and icons of contemporary culture, Peyton's portraits have regularly featured artists, writers, musicians, and actors.
Candida Höfer is a German photographer. She is a renowned photographer known for her exploration of public spaces and architecture. In her career she transitioned from portraiture to focusing on spaces like libraries and museums. She is a former student of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Like other Becher students, Höfer's work is known for technical perfection and a strictly conceptual approach. Her work explores the ways in which institutional architecture shapes and directs human experience. Höfer's technical approach is reflective of her goals as an artist.
Hannah Wilke (born Arlene Hannah Butter; was an American painter, sculptor, photographer, video artist and performance artist. Wilke's work is known for exploring issues of feminism, sexuality and femininity.
Kai Althoff is a German visual artist and musician.
Skulptur Projekte Münster is an exhibition of sculptures in public places in the city of Münster (Germany). Held every ten years since 1977, the exhibition shows works of invited international artists for free in different locations all over town, thereby confronting art with public places. After every exhibition, the city buys a few of the exhibited sculptures which are then installed permanently.
Goshka Macuga is an artist based in London. She was one of the four nominees for the 2008 Turner Prize.
Sergei Sviatchenko is a Danish-Ukrainian architect, artist, photographer and curator. He is a representative of the Ukrainian New Wave, that arose in Ukraine up through the 1980s. Initiator and creative director of the Less Festival of Collage, Viborg and Just A Few Works. He has lived in Denmark since the 1990s. Sviatchenko graduated from Kharkov National University of Construction and Architecture in 1975, and in 1986 he studied a Ph.D. at the National Academy of Visual Arts and Architecture. Sviatchenko is the son of architect Evgenij Sviatchenko (1924–2004), who was professor of architecture and a member of the National Ukrainian Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture, and engineer Ninel Sviatchenko (1926–2000). In 1975 Sergei Sviatchenko completed his architectural studies at Kharkov National University of Construction and Architecture. Sergei Sviatchenko is especially oriented towards architecture's modern expressions, among these are Constructivism and the contemporary European Bauhaus movement. From his teacher, Professor Viktor Antonov, Sviatchenko was introduced to the film director Andrei Tarkovsky, and particularly his film Mirror from 1975 has left a thematic footprint in Sviatchenko's more recent collage art. After having worked as an architect for a number of architectural firms in Kharkov until 1983, Sviatchenko moved to Kyiv, where he successfully graduated the master's program at Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture|Kiev National University of Construction and Architecture, having completed his Ph.D. dissertation "Means to Visual Information in Architecture". In the 1980s he was one of the founders of the Soviart Center for Contemporary Art (Soviart) in Kiev and co-organizer and curator of the first Ukrainian exhibitions of contemporary art "Kiev-Tallinn" at Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute|Kiev Polytechnic Institute(1987), "Kiev-Kaunas" (1988), the first joint exhibition by Soviet and American artists (1988) and curated the first Ukrainian exhibitions in Denmark: "21 perceptions. Young Contemporary Ukrainian Artists" (1989), "Ukrainian Art 1960–80" (1990), "7 + 7" which was the first joint exhibition by Soviet and Danish artists (1990) and "Flash. A New Generation of Ukrainian Art" (1990). At the end of 1990 Sviatchenko moved to Denmark with his wife Helena Sviatchenko having been awarded an art scholarship. In the same year he began to participate in solo and group exhibitions.
Franz West was an Austrian artist.
Modern sculpture is generally considered to have begun with the work of Auguste Rodin, who is seen as the progenitor of modern sculpture. While Rodin did not set out to rebel against the past, he created a new way of building his works. He "dissolved the hard outline of contemporary Neo-Greek academicism, and thereby created a vital synthesis of opacity and transparency, volume and void". Along with a few other artists in the late 19th century who experimented with new artistic visions in sculpture like Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin, Rodin invented a radical new approach in the creation of sculpture. Modern sculpture, along with all modern art, "arose as part of Western society's attempt to come to terms with the urban, industrial and secular society that emerged during the nineteenth century".
Galerie Buchholz is an art gallery specializing in international contemporary art with exhibition spaces in Cologne, Berlin and New York City. The gallery was founded in Cologne in 1986 by Daniel Buchholz, and today is run jointly with Christopher Müller.
Ree Morton was an American visual artist who was closely associated with the postminimalist and feminist art movements of the 1970s.
Tracey Snelling is an American contemporary artist. Working with sculpture, video, photography and installation, and deriving from sociology, voyeurism and geographical and architectural location, her work gives her impression of a place, its people, and their experience.
Sabine Hornig is a German visual artist and photographer who lives and works in Berlin. Her work in photography, sculpture, and site-specific installation art is known for her interpretations of modernist architecture and contemporary urban life. Her work has appeared in solo exhibitions throughout the world, including Double Transparency at Art Unlimited Basel in Switzerland (2014) and Projects 78 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2003), and in numerous group exhibitions at institutions like the J.Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and ICA London.
Sabine Breitwieser is an Austrian curator, art manager and publicist.
Isa Melsheimer is a German sculptor, object and installation artist, painter and university lecturer.
References
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Isa Genzken.
↑ Morrill, Rebecca; Wright, Karen; Elderton, Louisa, eds. (2019). Great Women Artists. London: Phaidon. p.151. ISBN978-0714878775.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
Spiegel (1991), installed in Bielefeld, Germany
