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ISA GENZKEN FIRST ATTRACTED ATTENTION during the 1970s with a
series of sculptures she called Ellipsoids: long, thin, patently sensual Genzken finds many
forms made in stainless steel, fibreglass or wood that stretched the
doctrines of minimalism into supine biomorphic form. She studied at
the Düsseldorf Art Academy under such luminaries as Joseph Beuys, of the objects
Gerhard Richter (to whom she was married for a time) and Bernd and
Hilla Becher, and her first shows were at Düsseldorf’s Konrad Fischer
Galerie, the key venue for minimalism and conceptualism in Europe. for her sculptures
She was working in this arena – it is always important to mention
– at a time when female artists, and particularly sculptors, were rare
in Germany. The Ellipsoids (1976–82) and later Hyperbolos (1979–85) in shops purveying
did away with plinth, upright stance and rectilinearity while retaining
the mathematical certitude of American minimalism’s rhetoric – she
developed these forms, after all, using a computer program . nothing but junk
These early forms seem remarkably distant from her present
work – chaotic assemblages of found and handmade, cheap and
valuable objects, standing in reduced scale on solemn rectangular
below and facing page: Wasserspeier and Angels, 2004 plinths, or cobbled together in vast, anarchic installations. Her 2006
(installation view, Hauser & Wirth, London),
exhibition at the Secession, in Vienna, resembled a demented Busby 18 parts, 42 aluminium plates, mixed media.
© the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Zurich/LondonBerkeley dream, with colourful broken umbrellas shielding wheelchairs,
plastic dolls and walking frames. Her latest work gamely offers narrative
content – the series Empire/Vampire, Who Kills Death (2002–3) owes
its name to a screenplay she wrote but never published – alongside
articulated contradictions, fetishes and topical allusions. However,
between these studies in psychosis and human fragility, and her
stereometric forms of the 1970s, lies not a path of increasing referentiality
but a famously variegated practice that includes rough plaster
sculptures which seem to be maquettes of ruins, heavy, monumental
sculptures of poured concrete, large-scale public sculptures that
mirrored or extended faceless modernist architecture, windows made
in epoxy and concrete, columns of various sizes, material and personal
significance, collaged photographs, ungainly resin lamps and bonnets,
and the inimitably named series of assemblage work called Fuck the
Bauhaus/New Buildings for New York (2000). Seen in survey, her work
betrays impatience and a cruel, house-cleaning streak; she picks up
idioms and, exhausting them, leaves them coldly behind.
This month Genzken represents Germany at the Venice
Biennale, with an installation curated by Nicolaus Schafhausen of Witte
de With in Rotterdam, and shows new work at the Skulptur Projekte
Münster 07, the citywide festival of public sculpture that takes place
every ten years. Genzken finds many of the objects for these sculptures
in the cheap, undesigned and uncared-for shops that somehow stay
in business despite purveying nothing but junk – toy soldiers, kitschy
souvenirs, cheap plastic anythings. The reduced scale of the Empire/
Vampire assemblages suggests a geekier engagement with the
material at hand than her more impassive previous work has evoked:
an interest in details, a privileging of the trees over the forest, a series
of one-to-one relationships that obsesses rather than overawes. The
nineteenth-century porcelain figures in Empire/Vampire III, 21 (2004) –
a rearing horse, an army general, ballet dancers in a duet – stand atop a
plinth on which cheap T-shirts hang as if thrown by a morose teenager.
The contradictions contained within the piece are manifest – high/low,
cheap/valuable, mass-produced/unique – and are arranged in such a
way that ingredients and their meanings are always left unresolved.
The assemblage works’ seeming inability to cohere derives from the
equal footing that she gives to all the elements: not approximating any
classical or recognisable composition, or setting off any one element
p100-102 Genzken v2 AR Jun07.ind101 101 9/5/07 02:54:19
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