Rebecca Horn, German Artist of Alchemical Sculptures, Dies at 80

Rebecca Horn, a venturesome artist whose work explored states of transformation and seen the physique as a portal to different dimensions, died on Saturday at 80. Her New York gallery, Sean Kelly, introduced her loss of life, however didn’t state a trigger.

Horn’s mysterious, beguiling work is taken into account important in Germany, the nation the place she was based mostly. There, her artwork was a staple in exhibitions reminiscent of Documenta, the carefully watched present that recurs as soon as each 5 years in Kassel, though her work has additionally been proven internationally, in venues starting from the Venice Biennale to New York’s Guggenheim Museum. As we speak, her affect is seen far and broad, in works starting from Matthew Barney’s ritual-driven movies to Pipilotti Rist’s off-kilter movies with feminist undercurrents.

Her performance-oriented works of the Nineteen Sixties envisioned new prospects for girls’s our bodies, outfitting her contributors with appendages that induced them to look extra like animals. Her mechanized sculptures from the a long time afterward would additional these themes, providing up objects created from steel, liquid, mirrors, and extra that appeared not fairly human but not fairly inorganic both.

Items reminiscent of these made it inconceivable to categorise Horn, an artist whose work by no means expressed its thematic considerations in simple methods. As an alternative, her artwork spoke a language that might solely be felt reasonably than understood. It tapped into discomfiting psychological states and sometimes even supplied a path towards empowerment for her viewers.

Her work was typically stated to have a ritualistic high quality, one thing she embraced. “Alchemy,” Horn as soon as informed the British publication Frieze, “is a visualising course of, however ultimately it serves to take your consciousness to the next aircraft.”

The 1968–72 sequence “Private Artwork” was amongst Horn’s first important our bodies of labor. In these drawings, images, and performances, Horn engineered eventualities by which performers had been made to don weird wearable components—“physique extensions,” as she known as them. They variously resembled horns, lengthy nails, feathered plumes, and different, much less instantly recognizable issues, all in service of discovering methods for people to transcend themselves and turn into one thing else altogether.

Within the case of Pencil Masks, a 1972 efficiency documented by way of video, Horn crafted a cloth contraption lined with pencils that she wore on her face. She then moved repeatedly round a wall, creating scrawls as she did so. This physique extension, with its S&M-like overtones, epitomizes the erotic high quality of a lot of Horn’s works. It suggests that folks’s our bodies exist in house—they actually depart marks on their environment—whereas additionally channeling a malevolent vitality distinctive to Horn’s oeuvre.

She would go on to eat flowers within the title of efficiency artwork, sculpt pianos that disgorged their keys, and create installations that spoke properly to the evil that lurked behind each nook in postwar Germany. By no means as soon as, nevertheless, did her work make for simple viewing.

Curator Germano Celant as soon as wrote in Artforum that Horn’s works had been “embellishments of the self, envelopes which give that means to the fluctuations and pleasures that happen between the self and the outer world. Via them, Horn is mirrored.”

Rebecca Horn was born in 1944 in Michelstadt, Germany. From a younger age, she developed a fascination with Johann Valentin Andreae, a German theologian who wrote about alchemy through the fifteenth century, and Raymond Roussel, a Twentieth-century French poet whose work was formative for a lot of modernists. These figures instilled in Horn a love of all issues fantastical—a ardour that finally caught the attention of Surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim, who would later turned a pal to Horn and a supporter of her movies early on.

Horn attended the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg between 1964 and 1970. However her research had been interrupted in 1968, when she developed a lung situation because of working with sure supplies for her sculptures. She then was compelled to spend time in a sanatorium, the place she took up drawing and stitching.

As soon as she obtained out, Horn produced one in every of her most well-known works, Unicorn (1970), for which a feminine stranger was given a large horn-like object to put on on her head and made to stroll by a discipline. In a ensuing 1973 movie of the work often called Performances 2, the girl may be seen rigidly traipsing amongst tall grass, her breasts bared and her kind almost unrecognizable. “By being become a prisoner,” Horn later recalled, “she freed herself inside.”

Horn had a behavior of turning viewers into prisoners, too. Die Chinesische Verlobte (The Chinese language fiancée, 1977) was a box-like construction that closed as soon as somebody entered it. Inside, one might hear audio of two Chinese language women speaking to one another. Horn stated she needed viewers to really feel contained by the piece.

Through the ’80s, Horn’s work grew larger and extra sprawling, and sometimes took the type of installations. For the 1987 version of Skulptur Projekte Münster, a famed exhibition that situates large-scale sculptures round its titular German metropolis, Horn debuted The Live performance in Reverse (1987) in a website the place the Gestapo murdered prisoners throughout World Struggle II. As one traversed this dungeon-turned-penitentiary, one would encounter funnels that dripped water, hammers, and sound components that Horn known as “knocking indicators from one other world.” In the meantime, as a part of the piece, two stay snakes bore witness to all of it; they had been fed day by day with one mouse.

She additionally made characteristic movies reminiscent of 1990’s Buster’s Bed room, by which Donald Sutherland stars reverse Geraldine Chaplin, daughter of the silent-movie star Charlie Chaplin. The movie’s focus is one other superstar of the silent period, Buster Keaton, whom the film’s feminine protagonist needs to be taught extra about. Buster’s Bed room performed on the Cannes Movie Competition earlier than being become an exhibition that appeared on the Museum of Modern Artwork Los Angeles.

Round this time, Horn’s profession started to take off within the US. In 1993, she staged an unlimited exhibition within the rotunda of the Guggenheim, whose glass ceiling was hung with Paradiso (1993), two breast-like objects made from Plexiglas that periodically dripped white liquid under. “Ms. Horn is actually an astute showman,” the New York Occasions famous in its evaluation. “She possesses a vaudevillian sense of timing and humor.”

Others appeared to agree. She gained the highest prizes at Documenta and the Carnegie Worldwide, and in addition obtained the Praemium Imperiale, an award given out in Japan that on the time got here with $169,000. She figured in three editions of the Venice Biennale, together with the 2022 one, and obtained a Haus der Kunst retrospective earlier this yr.

Throughout her varied our bodies of labor, Horn reveled within the notion that she could also be efficiently capable of bizarre viewers out. “Confusion,” she as soon as stated. “I like that.”