Lust for Interaction & other Secret Desires / Rebecca Horn

At once personal and universal, Rebecca Horn signs her private confessions through the use of art. Horn created works during the 70’s while recovering from a severe lung poisoning that isolated her in a hospital for a long time. Her work has been the subject of various solo exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, the Gropius Bau, the Whitechapel Gallery, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Neue Nationalgalerie, and the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow. She achieved fame in 1972 as the youngest participant in the epochal Documenta 5 with the title Individual Mythologies – curated by Harald Szeemann. Recently, she has participated the Venice Biennale (2022) and her work has sold six figures at auction.

Self-expression composes the solid basis for the construction of a personality. Rebeca Horn found her alternatives and exceptional communicative forms to share her sensations with the world and added a unique language to the dictionary of art. Her mystical side looks back to alchemical explorations with various wearable sculptures are appeared like torture mechanisms and represent her complex emotional states. Horn’s work stands brave and touching at the same time. She is a female satyr that cuts to the bone the rotten pillars of the Bourgeoisie. Since the early 1970s, German visual artist Rebecca Horn has developed an autonomous position beyond all abstract and minimalist movements. Inspired by Frida Kahlo’s paintings, Franz Kafka’s bohemian novels, the chaotic aftermath of post-war Germany, personal traumas, and her father’s highly eccentric taste and frightening stories, her creations always balance tenderness and pain. She is best known for her installation art, film directing, spatial installations and body modifications such as Einhorn (Unicorn), a body suit with a very large horn projecting vertically from the headpiece. Through her work, she turned everyday objects into symbolic references to expose the societal exploits of the female body-nature. Horn’s obsessions over balance and symmetry depict her perception of reality, where “dark moods” are counterbalanced by their opposing mental states.

“I always start with an idea, a story, which develops into a text, which in turn becomes a sketch, then into a film, which then becomes the sculptures and installations. It’s all connected.”