Ground Zero
3 April - 17 May 2008
London
Isa Genzken presents a new body of work that is displayed across the Piccadilly gallery; including the main gallery and mezzanine, as well as the American Room on the top floor which has been out of bounds for several years; and continues across the road in Swallow Street. At the exhibition’s core is a presentation of Genzken’s long-awaited architectural proposals for Ground Zero, the twenty first century’s most historically significant site. These proposals take the form of architecturally induced sculptures produced in consultation with a specialist team of engineers to ensure that each model can be realised to the approximate scale of the World Trade Towers. Running contrary to official designs, Genzken envisages buildings with a social purpose – a church, hospital, car park, disco, memorial and shopping centre. The emphasis being on community projects that might help emotionally regenerate the site, as opposed to office buildings or the kind of structures one might find in Dubai.
Genzken’s proposals exist in dialogue with the fantastical designs of Daniel Libeskind and draw upon the artist’s long-standing love affair with America’s breathtaking cityscapes and all pervasive culture. With their glitzy, seductive surfaces, slim rectangular forms and frenetic energy, her works betray a fascination with the skyscraper. Earlier exhibitions such as 'Fuck the Bauhaus. New Buildings for New York' make explicit Genzken’s preference for the rigours of Miesian geometries and expensive materials over Germany’s more drab socialist experiments. New York represents a vital source of energy that she returns to again and again and which is intrinsically related to what she does: “To me New York has a direct link with sculpture.”
Not unlike the Manhattan skyline, Genzken’s structures are audacious and alluring in equal measure. They are shimmering and metaphorical, exquisitely physical yet aptly perceived as miniature representations of the world in which we live. Consisting of brightly coloured fabrics, outdoor parasols, sheet steel, mirror tile, saccharine photographs of animals and a plethora of household chintz, Genzken’s output is ultimately precarious: a hedonistic concoction in which clashing elements congregate and collide. Lurid swathes of vinyl, spray-painted toys and vandalised sofas conspire to simulate a contemporary environment in which the paraphernalia of modern living become unlovely harbingers of a violent new order. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh recently observed that Genzken’s work emits ‘an aesthetic of rupture, rubble, and architectural fragments’.
In recent years, Genzken’s work has become increasingly imbued with a political and symbolic urgency. In Oil, her installation for the German Pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale, splendour and misery, euphoria and disillusionment were interrelated. One of the most controversial and celebrated shows of the Biennale, Oil was considered to be the best exhibition of 2007 by several artists in Artforum including Elizabeth Peyton who described it as 'devastating and poetic, concisely capturing the beauty and tragedy of the world we live in. That Genzken finds a way to make such huge statements in an abstract, nonliteral way while creating magically beautiful objects is monumental.'
Isa Genzken was recently chosen by Monopol magazine as the world’s most important artist. For over thirty years she has developed a radically variegated career that refuses to let the viewer know what to expect. She was born in 1948 in Bad Oldesloe, Germany and studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf whose faculty included Joseph Beuys, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Gerhard Richter. She became known in the 1970s for a series of long, sensual structures she called 'Ellipsoids' which took the language of minimalism and made it curved. At a time when there were few successful female sculptors in Germany she showed at the influential Konrad Fischer Gallery, exhaustively adopting a succession of inimitable artistic idioms. Genzken has had solo exhibitions at major museums and galleries around the world. In 2007 her work featured for a remarkable third time in the ten-yearly Skulptur Projekte Münster and she represented her nation at the Venice Biennale. Genzken lives and works in Berlin.
An artist’s book focusing on the Ground Zero sculptures will be available from the end of April. Isa Genzken. Ground Zero will feature essays by David Bussel and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and is published by Steidl Hauser & Wirth.
White Horses
2008
Umbrella
2008
Orang-Utan
2008
Untitled
2008
Geburt
2008
Abendmahl
2008
Office Lighting
2008
Windscreen 1
2008
Windscreen 2
2008
Couple
2008
Goofy
2008
Hotel Tools
2008
Me Dreaming
2008
Spiderman
2008
Flying Sofas
2008
Mies
2008
Bookshelves
2008
Italian Lamp
2008
Spray Painting
2008
Untitled
2008
Isa Genzken has long been considered one of Germany’s most important and influential contemporary artists. Born in Bad Oldesloe, Germany, Genzken studied at the renowned Kunstakademie Düsseldorf whose faculty at the time included Joseph Beuys, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and Gerhard Richter. Since the 1970s, Genzken’s diverse practice has encompassed sculpture, photography, found-object installation, film, drawing and painting. Her work borrows from the aesthetics of Minimalism, punk culture and assemblage art to confront the conditions of human experience in contemporary society and the uneasy social climate of capitalism.Genzken is best known for her sculptures, gaining attention for her minimalist oriented Hyperbolos and Ellipsoids in the late 70s, and architecturally-inflected works such as her recent epoxy resin windows and skyscraper Columns from the 90s. Genzken’s practice is incredibly wide-ranging, but her work remains dedicated to challenging the viewer’s self-awareness by means of physically altering their perceptions, bringing bodies together in spaces and integrating elements of a mixed media into sculpture.
Genzken’s totemic columns, pedestal works and collages combine disparate aspects from her many sources in seemingly nonsensical, yet harmonious sculptural compilations. These sculptures take the form of precariously stacked assemblages of potted plant designer furniture, empty shipping crates and photographs, among other things, arranged with the traditions of modernist sculpture in mind. With this cacophonous array of objects, Genzken undermines the classical notions of sculpture, re-creating the architectural dimensions of her beloved skyscrapers and the riotous colors of the city streets. Devoid of the weightiness and overpowering scale seen in the sculptures of her Minimalist predecessors, her work abandons notions of order and power, allowing the viewer to relate to the works’ inherently human qualities of fragility and vulnerability.
Inspired by the stark severity of modernist architecture and the chaotic energy of the city, Genzken’s work is continuously looking around itself, translating into three-dimensional form the way that art, architecture, design and media affects the experience of urban life, and the divides between public and private. There is an intuitive and consistent manner to Genzken’s work, not only in dramatising aspects of space and scale for the audience, but in creating new dialogues and contact with surfaces of material. The socio-political content is evident and central to her oeuvre.
In 2017, Genzken was awarded the prestigious Goslarer Kaiserring (or Emperor’s Ring) by the city of Goslar, Germany.
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Downtown Los Angeles
Arbeiten auf Papier / Works on Paper / Oeuvres sur Papier: 1975 – 2009
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The Fact That It Amazes Me Does Not Mean I Relinquish It
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Arbeiten auf Papier / Works on Paper / Oeuvres sur Papier: 1975 – 2009
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