Rebecca Horn
The flame of utopia
Things that mark you: being born into a Jewish family in Germany in 1944 and spending the first days of your life fleeing from the Nazis in the heart of the Black Forest. Surviving, contracting tuberculosis; surviving again; learning to draw with a Romanian governess until you become one of the most important artists of the second half of the twentieth century. This is the story of Rebecca Horn (Germany, 1944–2024), the woman who always fanned the flame of utopia in order to counteract devastating conformity.
Confined to a hospital bed, ailing from tuberculosis, a teenage Rebecca Horn started to draw in a style that was already striking. “We could not speak German back then, Germans were hated all over the world. We had to learn French and English and we were always travelling somewhere else. But I had a Romanian governess who taught me how to draw. And I did not have to draw in German or French or English. I could just draw”, says Horn.
When, years later, Rebecca Horn began to study Art, she used fibre glass and polyester as sculpture materials, giving her lung poisoning. After she recovered, at the age of 20, she started sculpting her own body.
Her early work, from the ‘seventies, is radical and highly social and politically charged. Her performances explore her obsession with the imperfect body and the balance between the figure, objects and space. “At the very least, I provoke”, she asserted during that period.
“Looking back at my first pieces you always see a kind of cocoon, which I used to protect myself. Like the fans where I can lock myself in, enclose myself, then open and integrate another person into an intimate ritual. This intimacy of feeling and communication was a central part of the performances. My performances started out as body sculptures. All the basic movements centred on movements made by my body and its extremities”, said Horn. [...]
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