Rebecca HORN

the four-time DOCUMENTA participant was the first woman ever to be given the honor of a solo exhibition at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 1995 and has since them exhibited in the most important museums on all continents. She is known for her installations full of mysticism and magic, with which she transforms memory into movement and feelings into images that represent the “lost “Paradise”.

Rebecca HORN’s fragile devices are full of poetry. They play perfectly with the contrasts between technology and living beings: the fascinating, morbid beauty of machinery, whose iridescent butterfly wings moving up and down create the perfect illusion of nature. As if created in an alchemical laboratory, the fleeting beauty of the butterfly, which actually only lasts one summer, is perpetuated into immortality with the help of a mechanical construction. However, trapped – like all machines – in an endless loop of the same thing. Unable to break through the boundaries of their existence – and trapped in a transparent container, this glass cage and the regular rhythm of the machines probably also make us think about our own existence. This is exactly the core of Rebecca HORN’s art: the regular rhythm, the pulsation of the human body, that constant throbbing that distinguishes life from death. Rebecca HORN’s anthropomorphic machines are surrogates of the desiring body – they flirt, dress up, pose or tremble, thereby exposing the hidden, amorous driving forces of the human psyche.”

(Nancy Spector in Rebecca HORN; exhibition catalog of the Nationalgalerie Berlin / Kunsthalle Wien, 1994 p.66ff).