Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, August 30, 2023: Rebecca Horn, a German visual artist, sculptor, installation artist. (#1892)

Wednesday, August 30, 2023

Artist of the Day, August 30, 2023: Rebecca Horn, a German visual artist, sculptor, installation artist. (#1892)

Rebecca Horn (1944) was born in Germany. She was taught to draw by her Romanian governess and became obsessed with drawing with expression because it was not as confining or labeling as oral language. Living in Germany after the end of World War II greatly affected the liking she took to drawing. "We could not speak German. Germans were hated. We had to learn French and English. We were always traveling somewhere else, speaking something else. But I had a Romanian governess who taught me how to draw. I did not have to draw in German or French or English. I could just draw."

Horn spent most of her late childhood in boarding schools and at nineteen rebelled against her parents' plan of studying economics and decided to instead study art. In 1963 she attended the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts). A year later she had to pull out of art school because she had contracted severe lung poisoning. "In 1964 I was 20 years old and living in Barcelona, in one of those hotels where you rent rooms by the hour. I was working with glass fibre, without a mask, because nobody said it was dangerous, and I got very sick. For a year I was in a sanatorium."

After leaving the sanatorium Horn began using soft materials, creating sculptures informed by her illness and long convalescence.

Horn is one of a generation of German artists who came to international prominence in the 1980s. She practices body art, but works in different media, including performance art, installation art, sculpture, and film.

In 1968 Horn produced her first body sculptures, in which she attached objects and instruments to the human body, taking as her theme the contact between a person and his or her environment. Einhorn (Unicorn) is one of Horn's best known performance pieces: a long horn worn on her head, its title a pun on her name. She presented Einhorn at the 1972 Documenta. Its subject is a woman who is described by Horn as "very bourgeois", "21 years-old and ready to marry." She walks through a field and forest on a summer morning wearing only a white horn protruding directly from the front of the top of her head, held there by straps.

Another piece that involves the illusion of feeling and one's hand is Feather Fingers. (1972). A feather is attached to each finger with a metal ring. The hand becomes "as symmetrical (and as sensitive) as a bird's wing". When touching the opposite arm with these feather fingers one can feel the touch on the left arm and of the fingers on the right hand moving as if to touch the left arm but it is instead the feathers which make contact. Rebecca Horn describes the effect:

Horn continued to explore the image of feathers in her works of the 1970s and 1980s. Many of her feathered pieces wrap a figure in the manner of a cocoon, or function as masks or fans, to cover or imprison the body.

Various "machines" are the subjects of Horn's work in the 1980s. Among others, she created a machine to mimic the human act of painting in The Little Painting School Performs a Waterfall (1988).

In the 1990s a series of her impressive sculptures were presented in places of historical importance. In Weimar, the Concert for Buchenwald was composed on the premises of a former tram depot. The artist has layered 40 metre long walls of ashes behind glass, as archives of petrifaction.

Many Horn works also explore ambiguities in the idea of lenses. One would think that a large tinted lens exists for protection and cover, but it also has the effect of drawing attention to the person or figure behind it. The paradox of looking out and looking back is explored in her installation piece for Taipei 101, Dialogue between Yin and Yang (2002). The work sets up interactions between viewers, environment and sculpture as it uses binoculars and mirrors to suggest the passive and active energies.

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