Rebecca Horn, the German artist known for works exploring bodily boundaries and spatial relationships, died on Friday, September 6, at the age of 80.
The pioneering artist leaves behind a six-decade oeuvre that explores the human body through versatile mediums spanning performance, sculpture, film, installation, drawing, and photography. Her death was confirmed by Sean Kelly Gallery, which has shown works by Horn since 2002.
Horn was born in Michelstadt, Germany, in March 1944 to Jewish parents and experienced an early childhood heavily impacted by the aftermath of World War II. In a 2005 interview, she told the Guardian that she initially learned how to draw from her Romanian governess, who accompanied her family in their constant moves during her upbringing.
“We could not speak German. Germans were hated,” she told the publication. “We had to learn French and English. We were always traveling somewhere else, speaking something else … I did not have to draw in German or French or English. I could just draw.”
Overlapping with the avante-garde Fluxus movement of the ’60s and ’70s, Horn’s early career was characterized by performances involving body extensions — wearable constructions that exaggerated the movements and functions of various body parts and drew attention to one’s physical limitations. One of the earliest examples of these works, “Unicorn” (1970–72), involved a semi-nude performer walking through the woods while wearing a long, white conical structure strapped to her head. Other works include “Pencil Mask” (1972), a face covering with a pointy array of protruding pencils that allowed the wearer to draw by moving their head side to side, and “Finger Gloves” (1972), two lengthy prostheses made from wood and fabric that magnified finger movements on a deliberately grotesque scale.
Horn was also known for incorporating musical components such as violins, pianos, and metronomes into her installations. This is evidenced in “The Turtle Sighing Tree” (1994), a work involving a mechanical copper tree sculpture that periodically released a scream and an assemblage of pipe-like branches that emitted barely perceptible narrations on “the miseries of contemporary life.”
Alongside these complex installations, the artist’s early love for drawing continued throughout the rest of her career. This vast array of work, which included her Bodylandscape drawing series produced between 2003 and 2015, was the focus of a five-decade exhibition at Sean Kelly Gallery early last year.
Art dealer Sean Kelly, who collaborated with Horn on seven exhibitions during her later career, recalled to Hyperallergic how he initially met Horn in the mid-’80s in London, years before he moved to New York to open his namesake gallery.
“I was a very young curator at a startup public space, and the fact that Rebecca [Horn] trusted me was immensely important to me,” Kelly said, adding that he “learned literally more at her knee than from anybody else I’ve ever worked with.”
“She was very generous when we worked together for almost four decades, and whilst she always had the last word and ultimate view because it was her work, she was incredibly generous in allowing those who she trusted to have a voice and to contribute,” Kelly said. Horn’s work is currently on view in a six-decade retrospective at Haus der Kunst in Munich, which runs until October 13.
