Isa Genzken. New Works

The Museum der Moderne Salzburg celebrated the public début of a spectacular ensemble of sculptures created by the German artist Isa Genzken (1948 Bad Oldesloe—Berlin, DE) specifically for this occasion. A leading artist of our time, Isa Genzken has developed a major body of work in the post-war German context, but also in a critical dialogue with both European and American art. Genzken regularly surprises her audience by re-envisioning her art from the ground up. Over the course of four decades, she has built a work distinguished by ongoing creative reinvention as well as a highly idiosyncratic approach and an unmistakable idiom within each of her diverse groups of works. Her ensembles appear as protagonists in an open-ended play in which personal, autobiographical, and fictional elements enter an utterly novel dialectical relationship with technical and scientific principles and constructive concerns.

Genzken first rose to renown in the 1970s with elaborate floor sculptures made of wood, whose extreme forms and dimensions challenged viewers to explore the spaces in which they were installed. In the 1980s and 1990s, she turned her attention to casts made from plaster, concrete and epoxy resin reminiscent of architectural forms. In the past fifteen years, she has conceived her works as ensembles. She arranges sculptures and wall pieces, assemblages made from materials from building supplies and home improvement stores, in dioramas, using spray paint to accentuate details. As Genzken herself says, she wants to make “sculptures that represent a film scene, that have the quality of a model, not sculptures in the traditional sense, but in a flow of figures and perspective.”

In the new group of works, Genzken continued her search for a contemporary form of sculpture. Freestanding works and floor pieces formed a sort of procession leading up from the staircase to the sculpture gallery on the third floor, where wall works made of mirror foil and adhesive tapes highlight the audience’s involvement in the ensemble.