Rebecca Horn, a bold and venturesome artist known for exploring states of transformation and using the body as a portal to other dimensions, passed away on Saturday at the age of 80. Her New York gallery, Sean Kelly, announced her death but did not specify a cause.
Horn’s enigmatic and captivating work is regarded as essential in Germany, where she was based. Her art was a fixture at major exhibitions, including Documenta, the highly anticipated show held every five years in Kassel. Her work was also exhibited internationally, from the Venice Biennale to New York’s Guggenheim Museum.
Her influence can still be seen today, inspiring artists like Matthew Barney, known for his ritualistic films, and Pipilotti Rist, whose offbeat videos often carry feminist themes.
Since the beginning of the 1970s, German artist Rebecca Horn has been creating an oeuvre which constitutes an ever-growing flow of performances, films, sculptures, spatial installations, drawings, and photographs. The essence of their imagery comes out of the tremendous precision of the physical and technical functionality she uses to stage her works each time within a particular space.
Horn’s diverse body of work is bound together by a consistency in logic; each new work appears to develop stringently from the preceding one. Elements may be readdressed, yet appear in totally different, divergent contexts. In her first performances, the body-extensions, Horn explored the equilibrium between body and space. Following the physical experience of her performances with body extensions, masks, and feather objects of the 1970s were her first kinetic sculptures, as well as large, site-specific installations to honor places charged with political and historical importance. With her kinetic sculptures created during this time, the artist released and rediverted the weight of the past onto the physical spaces. The objects used in Horn’s sculptures, including violins, suitcases, batons, ladders, pianos, feather fans, and metronomes, move beyond their defined materiality and are continuously transposed into ever-changing metaphors touching on mythical, historical, literary, and spiritual imagery. Each of Horn’s installations is a step towards breaking down completely the boundaries of space and time, offering glimpses of a materially liberated universe.
