Isa Genzken's Extraordinary Burst of Invention

The German sculptor is honored for the breadth and depth of her practice.

BY DANIELLE AVRAM

Isa Genzken, Rose, 1993–1997 steel, aluminum, lacquer, approximate height 314.96 in.

This past fall the Nasher Sculpture Center announced German artist Isa Genzken as the fourth recipient of the Nasher Prize, a $100,000 award given annually to a living artist who is actively redefining the perception and possibilities of sculpture. Past recipients have included Doris Salcedo, Pierre Huyghe, and Theaster Gates, each of whom has realized ambitious, socially and environmentally driven projects that have turned sculpture into an experiential event.

But thus far no awardee has achieved the breadth and depth of Genzken, whose four-decade-long career spans multiple artistic movements and historic moments, and begat the contemporary iteration of sculptural assemblage, which is focused on the narrative arrangement of pre-existing objects.

“The Nasher’s belief is that modern sculpture is characterized by extraordinary bursts of invention,” says Nasher Director Jeremy Strick. “Genzken is someone who has done that within the confines of her own career, yet she’s also had tremendous impact on generations of younger artists. In recent years assemblage has been at the forefront of contemporary sculptural practice and Genzken has been at the center of that.”

Born in 1948 in northern Germany, Genzken grew up in the aftermath of World War II, a period marked by the reconstruction of bomb-ravaged cities and the reconciliation of a nation with its dark past, divided present, and seemingly bleak future. Raised by self-described “art freaks,” Genzken was exposed to art and culture from an early age. Her family relocated to the more cosmopolitan and capitalist West Berlin in 1960, the same year she first visited New York City. The two cities have consistently informed her work. Genzken went on to study art, art history, and philosophy at institutions in Hamburg, Berlin, and Cologne before being accepted to the prestigious Düsseldorf Academy in 1973, where professors included photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys, and her future husband, painter-sculptor-photographer Gerhard Richter.

Isa Genzken, OIL XV / OIL XVI, 2007, installation wall piece comprised of 23 panels in 3 segments, aluminum, metal foil, adhesive tape, metal, printed paper, 104.33 x 177.17 in., 104.33 x 177.17 in., and 106.30 x 51.97 in.; floor piece in 6 parts comprised of 2 mannequins, 2 plastic cases, 1 glass bowl, metal foil, plastic, fabric, 35 x 220 x 380 in.

Growing up in such a dichotomous environment—between ruin and reconstruction—had a profound impact on Genzken. Following the Allied victory, Germany was left in tatters. Unimaginable numbers of the population were tragically dead or displaced, and those who remained experienced devastating food and housing shortages. Germany’s urgent need to rebuild led to cityscapes punctuated by functional, modern shapes that eschewed historical accuracy for the sake of efficiency, the future of a nation literally rising from the rubble. One can see reverberations of this postwar landscape throughout Genzken’s career: her choice of construction materials like wood, metal, and concrete; her overt critique of urban design and architecture; and her focus on the spatial relationships between body, object, and memory. Her malleability as a maker and assembler calls to mind the ad hoc nature of living in turmoil—having to make do with what is on hand, objects serving multifunctional purposes, becoming emblematic of connectivity and survival.

“For almost fifty years Genzken has been aggressively ahead of the time and aggressively experimental,” says Laura Hoptman, Executive Director of The Drawing Center, who co-curated the artist’s 2013 retrospective. “She created allegorical abstractions that conjured up the Second World War at a time [the late 1970s] when very few German artists were looking at that legacy. Her sculptural objects took a formal rigor and made them into an allegory, and kind of a dangerous allegory.”

Early on, Genzken was primarily associated with Minimalism, most notably through the series of Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos (1976– 82) that launched her career. Inspired by Bruce Nauman’s meditative piece Instructions for a Mental Exercise, the structures are studies in the perception of space, volume, and mass. Although minimalist in form–stretching across the floor or leaning against the wall, the middles bowing out or collapsing inward, the ends coming to sharp points or flaring like trumpet bells—the works deviate from pure minimalism through Genzken’s desire for viewers to make associations between them and existing objects such as spears and toothpicks.

Throughout the 1980s, Isa Genzken shifted towards Postminimalism, working with decidedly more industrial materials that recalled the environment of her youth. Beginning with plaster molded to look like piles of rubbish, she quickly shifted to concrete, creating a series of objects that referenced architectural forms. Sitting atop tall metal scaffolds, the forms are sculptures upon pedestals, but also resemble the innards of bombed-out buildings, or the bones of future skyscrapers. They draw attention to negative space, a theme common in Genzken’s work. They suggest that, while both architecture and sculpture are generally intended to be indelible, they are by nature transitory: funneling the movement of bodies, memories, and histories, while succumbing to their own mortality through decay and destruction.

In her book, Isa Genzken: Sculpture as World Receiver (The University of Chicago Press, 2017), scholar Lisa Lee discusses Genzken’s propensity for using sculpture as a subjective narrator, stating, “Her artworks are receivers, yes, but they are also transmitters of a distinct perspective that is always personal, always incisive. Genzken’s mode of receptivity detects currents, works through them, and, finally, translates her critical position on these currents into the stuff of sculpture.”

In the early 1990s, Genzken pushed this aspect of her practice to the forefront. She had always worked in other mediums and had a longstanding fascination with modernity, having been one of the first artists to utilize computerized technologies and readily incorporating advertisements and functional design into her work. At this time, she also made radical shifts in her personal life, divorcing Richter after 11 years of marriage, moving from Cologne to Berlin (where she frequented techno-infused dance clubs), and cultivating relationships with a younger generation of artists and gallerists. All of these elements coalesced in her movement toward assemblage, which provided the freedom to focus on creating narratives and environments from existing objects, rather than constructing objects to service an idea. As the delineation between Genzken’s life and her art disappeared, the possibility for her work to address nuanced global issues became increasingly apparent.

Isa Genzken, Weltempfänger, 1988-1989, concrete and steel, 84.65 x 62.99 x 15.75 in.

Isa Genzken, Schauspieler II, 8, 2014, black child mannequin on glass stand, life-jacket, silver mirror foil, passport, woolen jumper, American football helmet, spray paint, 60.63 x 17.72 x 15.75 in.

Isa Genzken, Empire/Vampire III, 16, 2004, mixed media, metal, glass, plastic, lacquer, wood, 65.75 x 23.62 x 18.11 cm.

Isa Genzken, Leonardo, 2016–2017, concrete, antennae, MDF, adhesive tape, 90.55 x 28.35 x 11.81 in.

Genzken’s status as an agent of change was cemented (pun intended) in 2007, when she represented Germany at the Venice Biennale and participated in the groundbreaking New Museum exhibition Unmonumental. At the Biennale, Genzken grappled with the past, present, and future, creating an apes-to-astronauts cautionary tale about the global commodification of, and dependence on, oil, which included swathing the Nazi-era exterior of the German pavilion in orange construction netting. At the New Museum, Unmonumental (also curated by Hoptman), posited assemblage as the language of 21st-century art, a sculptural response to the Earth’s growing role as humanity’s junk drawer. Genzken’s sculpture, Elefant (2007), comprised of vertical blinds, artificial flowers, plastic tubing, and toy figures, was an architectural reliquary: an homage to the fallen buildings of Berlin and New York and the totemic mysticism of everyday objects.

Unmonumental also underscored Genzken’s influence on younger generations of artists. Assemblage’s prevalence in the years following the exhibition, combined with Genzken’s continued topical output and relative reclusiveness, have only served to further solidify her mythic status as an arbiter of contemporary art-making as an act of information compression, a way of wrangling the techno/information/object glut into something more manageable and meaningful. Artist Simon Denny, who has known Genzken for over a decade, describes her work as “a touchstone of contemporary materiality.”

Isa Genzken, Hallelujah (Yellow), 2012, MDF, metal, plastic, glass, mirror foil, perspex, globe, plastic figure, casters, 100.79 x 39.76 x 21.65 in.

Isa Genzken, Spielautomat, 1999–2000, slot machine, paper, chromogenic color prints, tape, plastic foil, 62.99 x 25.59 x 19.69 in.

Indeed, it’s nearly impossible to dissect the work of younger sculptors such as Denny, Kathryn Andrews, Rachel Harrison, Matias Faldbakken, or any artist working within the realm of high-low object/ materiality as social metaphor, without seeing traces of Genzken. As Denny states: “Her work always finds a way to make peace with the contemporary, to frame and help grasp what is around us. She distills a rate of change, a contrast of mass luxury, with mass exhaust(ion), of beauty with something more sinister. I cannot imagine contemporary sculpture without a figure like Isa.”