In 1967, the artist Rebecca Horn was confined to a German sanatorium for a lot of the yr. On a break from her research in Hamburg, and making work with poisonous glass fibre, she severely broken her lungs. Bedbound, and as a approach of processing the loneliness, Horn made sketches of her personal physique, including to which she drew a unprecedented array of appendages, symbols of her personal claustrophobia and reliance on the clunky hospital tools that helped her breathe. In a single an enormous horn protrudes from the top, in one other pendulums cling down from a face masks. There are straitjackets in others, and hoses and pipes hooked up to breasts in horrifying style.
When Horn was ultimately discharged, these drawings turned the idea for a few of the artist’s 22 “physique extension” sculptures, themselves utilised in efficiency and movie works: in Unicorn (1970) the large ungainly horn is strapped to a lady’s head as she walks bare via a subject; Pencil Masks (1972) is a torturous-looking headgear, from which a sequence of pencils spike out, worn by Horn to create drawings; Finger Gloves (1972) grotesquely elongates the performer’s digits to the bottom, a piece rumoured to have impressed Tim Burton’s movie Edward Scissorhands.
These works established Horn, who has died aged 80, as probably the most provocative artists round, although any shock worth was strictly utilised to convey her themes of transhumanism, expertise and bioethics, and never her personal self-promotion. In 2023, her longterm US gallerist Sean Kelly advised the Guardian: “She belongs to a era of artists who have been actual critical artists. She’s not doing a Louis Vuitton purse or one thing like that.”
In 1972 the curator Harald Szeemann included her work in Documenta 5, in Kassel; she was the youngest artist within the present. A yr later she had her first solo exhibition at Galerie René Block, in West Berlin. More and more personal as her fame grew, she appeared much less in her personal work, embarking on a sequence of kinetic sculptures (partly impressed by her childhood love of Raymond Roussel’s proto-dadaist novel Locus Solus, centred on the deranged innovations of a scientist). Peacock Machine (1981) featured white feathers animated by motors; Ballet of the Woodpeckers (1986) was a corridor of mirrors that echoed with the common tapping of motorised hammers in opposition to the glass. She turned interested in exhibiting in closely loaded venues: Ballet of the Woodpeckers was first put in in a psychiatric hospital in Vienna for the good thing about its residents earlier than it entered any gallery.
The private anguish that Horn had beforehand channelled was additionally changed, with explorations of inherited and cultural trauma. Invited to indicate at Skulptur Projekte Münster in 1987, she selected to exhibit a brand new fee in a tower by which the Gestapo had tortured prisoners: Live performance in Reverse included 42 mechanical hammers and 40 grave candles. “The tragic or melancholic facet is vital to me. I don’t even need [the installations] to work for ever,” she as soon as mentioned.
Typically she handled contemporaneous politics: Bees’ Planetary Map (1998), consisting of a room of empty beehives accompanied by a ghostly recording of bees emptying a hive, was made in response to the horrors then unfolding within the former Yugoslavia.
Horn was born in Michelstadt, Germany, to Ernst and Margarethe. Ernst was an industrialist with a love of opera, an artform Rebecca adored, nevertheless it was her Romanian governess who taught her to attract.
In 1963 she enrolled on the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg, to review artwork. On restoration from the lung grievance, she was awarded a scholarship to review at Saint Martin’s Faculty of Artwork (now Central Saint Martins) in London in 1971.
After Documenta 5 (she would revisit the competition once more in 1977, 1982 and 1992), a present at René Block Gallery, New York, precipitated a transfer to the town for a decade. “If a rustic asks me to make a chunk of labor for them, I am going and reside there,” she advised the creator Jeannette Winterson for the Guardian in 2005. “I exploit my physique, I exploit what occurs to me, and I make one thing.” Within the US she found ballet and made Der Eintänzer (1978), a 47-minute movie that culminates in younger feminine dancers trying steps whereas lashed collectively.
Horn returned to Europe completely in 1981, first to Paris, then settling in Berlin, taking a instructing place at its College of the Arts in 1989, the primary of many such posts within the metropolis, held lengthy after any monetary necessity. In 2009, retiring from schooling, she moved to the resort of Dangerous König, along with her studio based mostly in her grandfather’s former textile manufacturing facility.
In 1989 she made Kiss of the Rhinoceros, a kinetic work by which two curved metal pincers, every with a bladed steel horn hooked up, are introduced collectively by a motor, for the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre, on the Pompidou, Paris. The work was proven once more on the Venice Biennale in 2022, the fourth time the artist had participated within the biennale’s predominant present.
A mid-career retrospective of her work was staged in 1993 by the Guggenheim, New York, travelling to museums all through Europe, with a double billing on the Tate and Serpentine galleries in London. Horn’s work returned to the UK in 2005 for one more retrospective, this time on the Hayward Gallery, London. In 2019 the Centre Pompidou Metz and Museum Tinguely in Basel held concurrent exhibits. In April this yr Haus der Kunst München hosted yet one more retrospective, which is open till October, and this month a present opened at her Berlin gallery, Thomas Schulte.
