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FEATURE ISA GENZKEN
Blue Ellipsoid, 1977, wood, acrylic, 6 x 18 x 580 cm.
Friedrich Christian Flick Collection.
from the rest. The 2004 installation Wasserspeier and Angels, inspired concrete, similarly appeared in both public and private arenas during
by the gargoyles (Wasserspeier) of the Cologne cathedral, riotously the 1990s: they were windows without panes that often delivered ironic,
juxtaposes American skyscrapers – evoked through shiny swathes of nearly self-deprecating commentary on their surroundings – such as
foil – with kitsch plastic lambs and anthropomorphic figures cobbled the 30-metre high Spiegel (1992), placed opposite a drab Bielefeld
out of paper and puffa jackets, and mirrors, disco balls and klieg lights, building. Her masterful series of Weltempfänger sculptures (1987–92)
until it looks like some sinister, discordant system signifying ambition, – concrete radios with antennae sticking out – were deaf and dumb
hedonism and sacrifice. both literally and in aspect. These works came just after her exceedingly
Along these various reinventions Genzken’s work retains a elegant Hyperbolos, and squatly countered any sense of the beauty the
conspicuous artistic professionalism: every new object, though often artworld had come to expect from Genzken. They looked like Martians;
given autobiographical resonance – she will name her work after friends their antennae were bafflingly literal; they were roughly executed and
or memories, such as the Ellipsoid Joma (1981), after the boat Lawrence off-putting. This break is also apparent in her move towards explicit
Weiner used to keep docked in Amsterdam, or the standing columns content, in photocollages and assemblage – the latter of which
called Wolfgang [Tillmans] (1998) or Kai [Althoff] (2000) – seems coincided with the beginning of the Iraq war. In her present work the
irrevocably distanced from its studio origins. This technical intelligence political allusions and the mass-produced objects suggest a slow burn
allows her to move freely among subjects – from minimalism through of anger at the social and economic iniquities of consumer culture.
to public sculpture and modernist architecture, and now to the question These models represent the world as if in miniature, at a chaotic pitch
of the equivalency of object values in late capitalism. in which object, references and value collide with confused alarms, like
Genzken’s work has often taken the form of frustrated metaphors armies clashing in bright daylight.
of communication. During the early 1980s she asked women on the
streets of New York if she could photograph their ears (not one refused), Work by Isa Genzken is included in the Skulptur Projekte Münster 07,
and then exhibited the series of photographs in galleries or, billboard- 17 June to 30 September, and in the German Pavilion at the Venice
size, on the sides of buildings. A series of windows, in epoxy resin and Biennale, 10 June to 21 November
ARTREVIEW one.linzero.lintwo.lin
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