Rebecca Horn: Fructify Brush

Rebecca Horn (1944-2024) was a prolific German artist recognized for her pioneering contributions to performance art, sculpture, drawing, and filmmaking, and whose early output became defined by then-unknown consequences of working with fiberglass. After contracting a dangerous lung infection from using the material, she spent an extended convalescence period in forced solitude and restricted to a hospital bed, an experience that formed her lifelong concerns with states of freedom and confinement.

Separated from the world, she constructed soft sculptures and wearable ‘body-extensions’ which could be attached to her limbs to reach upwards and outwards in opposing directions, such as in Finger Gloves (1972) or Pencil Mask (1972), which was made up of straps with pencils attached at their intersections, so that moving her face along a wall could create a drawing. She often staged these works in performances and films that meditated on the body in both its possibilities and limitations, which eventually grew into her experimentation with motorized sculptures that contended with their own limited functions. In several feature-length films, she used these surreal machines as plot elements, objects symbolically trapped in repetitive action, yet released from their status as everyday materials. These machines, employing objects like paintbrushes, hammers, feathers, shells, and musical instruments, seem to take on a life of their own, framed by the dualities of liberation and dominance, nearness and distance, or logic and the absurd.

Born in Germany in the final years of World War II, Horn lived most of her life between New York and Paris before returning to Germany and establishing a studio in Bad König, Germany at the site of her grandfather’s textile factory, where she remained until her passing in 2024. Throughout her lifetime, she exhibited in some of the world's most renowned cultural sites and venues, including the Museum Tinguely, Basel; Centre Pompidou-Metz, France; Tate Modern, London; the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow; the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi; the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge; Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; MOCA, Los Angeles; the Neue National Galerie, Berlin; the Kunsthalle Wien; the Serpentine Gallery, London; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; the Kunsthaus Zürich; and the Anthology Film Archives, New York, among others. She also participated in major international art exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale in both 1997 and 2022; and editions 5 and 9 of documenta in Kassel, Germany. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including the 2017 Willhelm Lehmbruck Prize, Lehmbruck Museum; the 2016 Ordre pour le mérite des Arts et des Sciences, France; the Grande médaille des arts plastiques from the Académie d’architecture de Paris, 2011; the 2010 Premium Imperiale Prize, Japan, and the 1988 Carnegie Prize.

Courtesy of the Carmen Cuenca and Michael Krichman Collection