Haus der Kunst

The comprehensive retrospective “Rebecca Horn” presents an overview of the internationally renowned artist’s life’s work spanning six decades. The show opens at Haus der Kunst München on 25.4.24 and runs until 13.10.24.

The retrospective focuses on the aspect of performativity that runs through Horn’s (born 1944, Germany) entire oeuvre, from her first works on paper in the 1960s to the early performances and films of the 1970s, the mechanical sculptures of the 1980s, and the expansive installations of the 1990s to the present day. Horn describes her practice as precisely calculated relationships between space, light, physicality, sound, and rhythm, which combine to form an orchestration.

“First with the tips of your toes, then with your hips, your shoulders, and finally with every detail of your body, right down to the tips of your hair, which multiply ad infinitum in the mirrors.” – Rebecca Horn

The exhibition opens with the newly digitised film footage of Horn’s early work. The artist sees herself first and foremost as a choreographer – but is also inventor, director, author, composer, and poet. Her work centres on the human body and its relationship to nature, culture, technology, and the human and non-human. In the early 1970s, Horn devoted herself to the controllability and expansion of the body and used the symbolic power of movement from the language of dance as a medium and catalyst for her choreographic fictions. Since the early 1980s, she has used the idea of incorporation to create symbols of technical physical networking with her mechanical sculptures. In the 1990s, she developed her characteristically immersive spatial installations, in which she deconstructs and restages music, just as she draws inspiration from dance choreography. The exhibition concludes with Horn’s late work, in which she transforms her artistic grammar into an abstract choreography full of poetry and grace.

Virtuously interwoven references to literature, art, and film history run through Rebecca Horn’s entire oeuvre. She celebrates the horror of the machine as a continuation of the body, creates existences of the unpresentable, and gives a face to the abysmal. Her oeuvre is a lifelong and currently volatile echo of the progressive decentring of humanity. Through performativity, she places the sensuality of the body in relation to the environment at the centre of her life’s work.

Curated by Jana Baumann with Radia Soukni.