Leigh Arnold, Ph.D., on Isa Genzken

ISA GENZKEN

2019 Nasher Prize Laureate

This spring, the Nasher Sculpture Center will honor artist Isa Genzken as the fourth recipient of the Nasher Prize, an international award presented annually to a living artist who has made an extraordinary impact on our understanding of sculpture.

With a career spanning four decades, Isa Genzken has continually reinvented the language of sculpture by creating objects inspired by popular culture and historical events that explore the complexities of contemporary realism. Engaging a diverse range of media such as wood, plaster, concrete, textiles, and detritus and working in a variety of modes, including photography, filmmaking, painting, drawing, and collage, Genzken transforms vernacular materials into wholly unique forms. Her inventive, ad hoc approach to making, as well as her fearless embrace of chaos and change, has inspired a generation of artists, even as she continues to adapt, expand, and redefine her protean oeuvre.

Isa Genzken, Schauspieler II, 11, 2014, Black man mannequin on glass stand, silver mirror foil, brown and black jumper, safety pin, whip, orange paper roll, color print on paper, adhesive tape, 88.58 x 24.01 x 19.69 in (225 x 61 x 50 cm.), Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Buchholz

“We’d be hard-pressed to name an artist with a more textured and dynamic sculptural practice than Isa Genzken,” says Nasher Director Jeremy Strick. “Her work not only straddles an array of forms that complicate and enrich our understanding of sculpture, she also consistently challenges the way an artist’s career and oeuvre might look, breaking apart the notion of specialization within an individual studio practice. Her work can feel utterly urgent and visceral—fraught with emotion— while at other times, objects are rendered with such precision as to seem devoid of human touch. This range of material and conceptual rigor has positioned Genzken as a major influence on younger generations of artists working today amid the clamor of the digital age, offering permission and encouragement to subvert norms and invent new possibilities.”

Born in 1948 in Bad Oldesloe, Germany, Genzken is part of a generation of postwar German artists who inherited a fraught national history. While some artists turned to abstraction to avoid the subject of Germany’s past atrocities, others, such as Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke, and Genzken, confronted the traumas and aftermath of World War II by creating works that emphasized material culture and incorporated elements of Pop art and American Minimalism. Genzken studied fine arts, art history, and philosophy in Hamburg, Berlin, and Cologne before completing her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf in 1977. During that time, Genzken developed a broad network of contacts and references in an environment enriched by the Academy, the international program at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, an exhibition hall for contemporary art in the city, and at the Konrad Fischer Galerie, which was the primary advocate of Minimalism, process-based art, Land art, and Conceptual art in Germany. There, Genzken became affiliated with artists on the leading edge of Minimalist and Post-Minimalist sculpture, and in 1976 she would have her first solo show at the Konrad Fischer Galerie. While Genzken’s earliest works—her series of Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos (produced in 1976 through the mid- 1980s), in particular—formally resemble Minimalist sculpture, their associative aspects break with its hermeticism. “Of course, it was exactly this ‘content’ that I wanted to bring back into the Ellipsoids,” Genzken says, “so that people would say, ‘It looks like a spear, or a toothpick, or a boat.’ This associative aspect was there from the very beginning and was also intentional, but from the viewpoint of Minimal art, it was absolutely out of the question and simply not modern.”

Read more about Isa Genzken and other topics at the full magazine below.