Isa Genzken
Biographie
Isa Genzken was born in Bad Oldesloe, Germany, in 1948 and, after extended sojourns in Cologne and New York, she is currently living in Berlin. She studied from 1969-71 at the University of Visual Arts in Hamburg, from 1971-73 at the University of Visual Arts in Berlin, and from 1973-77 at the State Art Academy in Düsseldorf. In 2002 she was awarded the Wolfgang Hahn prize of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.
Additional biography
Genzken’s first solo exhibition was held in 1976 at the Konrad Fischer Gallery in Düsseldorf. Numerous solo exhibitions at renowned international museums as well as participations in major collective exhibitions such as “Skulptur Projekte Münster” or “Documenta IX and 11” followed. Isa Genzken’s work displays the greatest possible variety of references to architecture and industrial design as she continues to surprise her public time and again with new groups of works. “I find the rough-outer-shell constructions of new buildings most interesting, because they reveal the engineers’ rational thinking behind them, which has a great deal more to do with truth compared to the routine covering of the façades with pseudo-noble materials,” the artist is quoted as saying. Among other things, her references to 1920s constructivism and functionalism shows up most clearly in her computer-generated, geometrically constructed ground sculptures, the Hyperbolos and Elipsoiden of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the photographs of her Hi-Fi-Serie (1979), Genzken reproduced advertisements for stereo phonographs, which were deemed highly desirable by art collectors at the time. The four advertising objects, each from a different maker, originating from separate industrialized nations with separate official languages, were photographed and reproduced with such hard contrasts that they became readable as constructivist design works in their own right. The group of works made from plaster of Paris, negatives of miniature sculptures, and the later fragments made of concrete, have been positioned by the artist on bases or metal stands so that viewers are able to inspect them as they would an architectural model. The next phase of her work is in the window sculptures and other architectural or interior design quotations made from epoxy resin casts, such as column or lamp sculptures, but also lamp images. In her exhibition titles Isa Genzken likes to focus on architecture in a social context, as, for example, in Vom 23. Stock aus (Viewed from the 23rd Floor), Jeder braucht mindestens ein Fenster (Everybody Needs At Least One Window) or MetLife, as her retrospective at the Generali Foundation was entitled, citing an insurance company’s advertising inscription on a central building in New York that was created by Walter Gropius. Genzken also likes to make personal materials and messages available to the public, as in X-Rays (1981), showing enlarged x-ray photographs of the artist’s head, or in the reinforcements of the lamp in Lampe (1996), which represents the temperature curve of the artist‘s body in a notation readable only to the cognoscenti. Public projects have taken up a fairly significant part of Genzken’s work, in an active involvement that goes back to the 1980s. I Love New York, Crazy City (1995-96) is the title of three extraordinary books of collages which emerged during a phase of active self-discovery under the influence of the tremendous dynamics of the city of New York and so contain different documents of the artist’s day-to-day life, such as hotel and restaurant bills, photographs, and so forth. These books formed the starting point for a new group of works. Since the end of the second half of the 1990s, Genzken has been conceptualizing sculptures and panel paintings in the shape of a bricolage of materials taken from DIY stores and from photographs and newspaper clippings. (SB)
Artist's books
Isa Genzken. Isa Genzken. Der Spiegel 1989-91. Köln: Buchhandlung Walther König, 2003.
KM Genzken Isa 17 -- Isa Genzken. I love New York, crazy city. Ed. Genzken, Isa; Ruf, Beatrix. Text by Ruf, Beatrix. New York: Ringier, 2006.
KM Genzken Isa 21 FOLIO BUCH - - Isa Genzken. Mach dich hübsch. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2015.
KM Genzken Isa 27 RARA FOLIO -
