Visual Arts in Germany: Exhibitions and Artist Portraits

'Fenster'

Curator Nicolaus Schafhausen is quite certain: “The work with Isa Genzken is the most productive challenge of my career as a curator”. He has chosen Genzken (born in 1948) to represent the German Pavillion at the 52nd Biennale in Venice in 2007.

 

That could become an exciting encounter between Genzken, who in her thirty years’ career as an artist has continually come to grips with the subject of architeture, and the imperial language of the art temple built in 1909 (and rebuilt in 1938), whose tympanun is adorned with the inscription Germania.

Yet ... exciting? Her work is certainly exciting, but as part of a precise analysis according to which Western society is permanently in search of thrills, of excitement. In fact, Genzken’s work discloses itself slowly; one must engage with her patience to explore the most various aspects of the material qualities of objects. In appearance, her work has long remained unpretentious, reserved in dimension, not sufficiently spectacular for the art market and art scene. That would explain why, although the artist has continually taken part in the documenta and other international exhibitions and her influence on the younger generation of artists is uncontested, she has hitherto never enjoyed so great a public resonance as the stars.

Genzken already became known at the beginning of the 1980s through her five to ten meter long wooden floor sculptures. A marriage with the artist Gerhard Richter has left its mark on the work of both. If Richter in his conceptual painting questioned the presuppositions of his medium, Genzken in the 80’s began with her plaster and concrete sculptures to investigate architecture, which was then an object of the discourse of post-modern ‘defragmentation’.

Concrete Sculptures (1986-1992)

These conceptually designed architecture-objects of the 1980’s are not models of real spaces, but rather refer first of all to our fundamental ideas about architecture: what defines a space, what defines the closure of a space, what is a wall, how are walls connected to each other? In response to these questions, Genzken designs quite simple examples of spaces based on a rectangular ground plan, enclosed by tall, windowless concrete walls, as in ‘Marcel’ (1987). The architectural fragment is mounted at eye-level on a steel stand and arouses in the spectator a feeling of relief that he is not compelled to enter this hermetic cube. For Genzken creates not comfortable, sheltering spaces but claustrophobic ones full of the anxiety of a negatively charged architecture. Cracks in the fundament shoot through the concrete walls; the surfaces show signs of rough use. Genzken’s work continually questions architecture’s claim to exist in a stable immutability.

New Buildings for Berlin (2002-2003)

'New Buildings'

After the grey, concrete sculptures whose roughness touches the primal insecurity of human existence, her work became brighter. In the 90’s, a subtle light floods through her pieces. She uses at first the translucent material epoxy resin and then turns to coloured industrial glass, which lends her objects an aesthetic beauty. Accordingly, her subject becomes the facade, the outer covering of architecture.

In the series New Buildings for Berlin, which was shown at Documenta 11, Genzken designs architectural visions of glass high-rises. They are 80 cm high groups of towers which raise themselves on triangular and square ground plans and shimmer like fragile insects in dark translucent red, green, blue and yellow tones on shoulder-high pedestals before a window of the exhibition room.

Unfortunately, in the newly built Berlin there is not a single such architectural wonder as these, and Genzken also leaves no doubt of the model character of her vision by the use of profane materials: the corrugated and screened slabs of industrial glass are quite simply stacked into blocks. These are held together by black bands of adhesive tape and pasted, with thick traces of glue, to base plates.

Social Fascades (2002-2003)

The subject of smooth outward aesthetic appearance is continued in the series Social Facades (2002-2003), in which Genzken adopts the picture format of painting. Diverse strips of metal, from copper slabs to pressed aluminium sheets, are glued lengthwise to rectangular supports. The blank surfaces break the light into prisms and reiterate the mirror image of the spectator, like the echo of Narcissus, in innumerable small metal squares.

If in the connection between the cold metal materials and the glossy mirror images that arise on a flat surface without depth sounds an unmistakable criticism of the human ego, this waxes in the group of works entitled ‘Empire Vampire’ into a venomous swan song for human culture.

Empire Vampire, Who Kills Death (2002-2003)

'Empire Vam- pire'

Empire Vampire originally comprised more than twenty sculptures that were created following the attacks of September 11, which Genzken lived through in New York. The artist worked with trash materials like plastic toy figures so as to invoke an apocalypse of devastation. Her nearly colourless scenerarios begin after the outbreak of the inferno, and one is inevitably reminded of the pictures of New York, of the grey ash that fell over the destruction.

In October 2004, out of this group of works, Genzken created an installation outside the Lenbachhaus in Munich, consisting of two tall, slender showcases of glass and high-grade steel, significantly crowned by a floral sculpture. Inside the cases, in glass cups and smashed glasses, are arrangements of the shabby remains of a civilisation which has for so long recklessly used its achievements that the last life has been sucked out of it. Debris of a fun society that has partied itself to death. Nature? A small rubber dolphin that swims in a pool of blood in a smashed champagne goblet. The human ideal of perfection and beauty Collapsed, drowned in faded, meaningless, extravagant decoration over which a cheap silver colour has been tipped.

Kinder Filmen (2005)

The spatial installation Kinder filmen (i.e., Filming Children, 2005) at the Galerie Buchholz in Cologne showed a new side of Genzken. The fierce treatment of the objets trouvées, arranged into a complex film set, amazes the viewer: painted over in shining red or green, sprayed, pasted in room high dimensions. That makes a shrill, gruff, cheeky impression, and fosters the hope that the 58 year-old artist is not about to let herself be quietly overtaken by the younger generation. Yet – shrill, gruff, cheeky...?

Isa Genzken: Catalogue Raisonné Vol. II. 1992 -- 2003. Ed. by Isa Genzken, Veit Loers, Beatrix Ruf. Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Koenig, Cologne 2003, 196 pages, ISBN: 3883756881, 49,80 € Isa Genzken; Phaidon Press 2006; English, 160 pages, ISBN: 071484425X