Rebecca Horn
Encyclopedia
Rebecca Horn is a German
installation art
ist and film director most famous for her body modifications such as Einhorn (Unicorn), a body-suit with a very large horn projecting vertically from the headpiece, and Pencil Mask, a mesh harness for the head with many pencils projecting out. She directed the films; Der Eintänzer (1978), La ferdinanda: Sonate für eine Medici-Villa (1982) and Buster's Bedroom
(1990). Horn presently lives and works in Paris and Berlin.
, Germany
. She was taught to draw by her Romanian governess and became obsessed with drawing as expression because it was not as confining or labeling as oral language. Living in Germany after the end of World War II greatly affected the liking she took to drawing. "We could not speak German. Germans were hated. We had to learn French and English. We were always traveling somewhere else, speaking something else. But I had a Romanian governess who taught me how to draw. I did not have to draw in German or French or English. I could just draw."
Horn spent most of her late childhood in boarding schools and at nineteen rebelled against her parents' plan of studying economics and decided to instead attend Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts. A year later she had to pull out of art school because she had contracted severe lung poisoning. 'In 1964 I was 20 years old and living in Barcelona, in one of those hotels where you rent rooms by the hour. I was working with glass fibre, without a mask, because nobody said it was dangerous, and I got very sick. For a year I was in a sanatorium. My parents died. I was totally isolated.” After experiencing this “total isolation” until she felt that her life was over before it had begun, she walked out of the hospital. She was still too ill, however, to resume life as a student or work with fiberglass and polyester. She had to take masses of antibiotics and sleep long hours to have enough energy to operate normally. She could, however, work with softer materials, and when in bed she drew with colored pencils (which are still her favorite drawing tools). She also began to slowly break out of her self-imposed isolation and began to create sculpture and strange extensions with balsa wood and cloth. “I began to produce my first body-sculptures. I could sew lying in bed." Her goal then was to quash her “loneliness by communicating through bodily forms.”
Horn lived in Hamburg until 1971, in London
for a brief time (1971–2), and since 1973 in Berlin
.
, but works in different media, including performance, installation art
, sculpture
, and film
. She also writes poetry. Sometimes her poetry is influenced by her work, and on many occasions her poetry has inspired her work. When Horn returned to the Hamburg academy she continued to make cocoon-like things. She worked with padded body extensions and prosthetic bandages. In the late sixties she began creating performance art and continued to use bodily extensions.
: a long horn worn on her head, its title a pun on the artist’s name. She presented Einhorn at the 1972 Documenta
. Its subject is a woman who is described by Horn as “very bourgeois” is “21 years-old and ready to marry. She is spending her money on new bedroom furniture,” walks through a field and forest on a summer morning wearing only a white horn protruding directly from the front of the top of her head and the straps holding it there. These straps are almost identical to the ones worn in Frida Kahlo
’s painting Broken Column. The image, with wheat floating around the woman’s hips, is simultaneously mythic and modern.
'Pencil Mask' is another body extension piece, made up of six straps running horizontally and three straps running vertically. Where the straps intersect a pencil has been attached. When moving her face back and forth on a near a wall the pencil marks that are made correspond directly with her movements.
'Finger Gloves' is a performance piece and the main prop of that performance piece and was done in 1972. They are worn like gloves, but the finger form extends with balsa wood and cloth. By being able to see what she was touching and the way in which she was touching it, it felt as if her fingers were extended and in her mind the illusion was created that she was actually touching what the extensions were touching. There is another piece that she did that is very similar to this one. It is part of her Berlin Exercises series done in 1974 called “touching the walls with both hands simultaneously”. In this piece she made more finger extension gloves, but this time measured it so that they specifically fit the selected space. If the chosen participant stood in the middle of the room, they could exactly touch opposing walls simultaneously.
Another piece that involves the illusion of feeling and one’s hand is 'Feather Fingers.' (1972). A feather is attached to each finger with a metal ring. The hand becomes “as symmetrical (and as sensitive) as a bird’s wing”. When touching the opposite arm with these feather fingers one can feel the touch on the left arm and of the fingers on the right hand moving as if to touch the left arm but it is instead the feathers which make contact. Rebecca Horn describes the effect: “it is as if one hand had suddenly become disconnected from the other like two utterly unrelated beings. My sense of touch becomes so disrupted that the different behavior of each hand triggers contradictory sensations.” This piece focuses greatly on sensitivity.
Various "machines" are subject of Horn's work in the 1980s. Among others, she created a machine to mimic the human act of painting in The Little Painting School Performs a Waterfall (1988). Thirteen feet above the floor on a gallery wall, three fan-shaped paint brushes mounted on flexible metal arms slowly flutter down into cups filled with blue and green acrylic paint. After a few seconds of immersion they snap backward, spattering paint onto the wall, the ceiling, the floor, and onto canvases projected from the wall below. The brushes immediately resume their descent, and the cycle is repeated until each canvas is covered in paint.
In the 1990s a series of her impressive sculptures were presented in places of historical importance. Examples are the Tower of the Nameless in Vienna (1994), Concert in Reverse in Munich (1997), Mirror of the Night in an abandoned synagogue in Cologne (1998) and Concert for Buchenwald at Weimar (1999). In Weimar, the Concert for Buchenwald was composed on the premises of a former tram depot. The artist has layered 40 metre long walls of ashes behind glass, as archives of petrifaction. At the same time, the theme of bodily vitality, which the artist had been exploring since the seventies, was developed in site-specific installations that investigated the subject of the latent energy of places and the magnetic flows of space. This cycle comprises High Moon, New York (1991); El Reio de la Luna, Barcelona (1992); Spirit di Madreperla, Naples (2002). For the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, Horn was commissioned to create the steel sculpture L'Estel Ferit.
Many Horn works also explore ambiguities in the idea of lens
es. One would think that a large tinted lens exists for protection and cover, but it also has the effect of drawing attention to the person or figure behind it. The paradox of looking out and looking back is explored in her installation piece for Taipei 101
, Dialogue between Yin and Yang (2002). The work sets up interactions between viewers, environment and sculpture as it uses binoculars and mirrors to suggest the passive and active energies
.
. La Ferdinanda is in German; the other films are in English. In all of these films though, Horn’s obsession with the imperfect body and the balance between figure and objects is apparent. She has also collaborated with Jannis Kounellis
and produced some films, including the film Buster's Bedroom (1990) which was shot by the Academy Award-winning Sven Nykvist
and stars Donald Sutherland
, Geraldine Chaplin
, and Martin Wuttke
. For Buster’s Bedroom und Roussel, she collaborated with German writer Martin Mosebach
on the respective screenplays.
invited Rebecca Horn to participate in the 1972 Documenta
in Kassel, she was a virtually unknown twenty-one year-old artist. Sigmar Polke
had performed in one of her piece Simon Sigmar in 1971, and it was through him that Szeeman heard of her. Horn later had her first solo exhibition at the Galerie René Block, West Berlin, in 1973. She has since participated in the Venice Biennale
, Skulptur Projekte Münster
, and the Biennale of Sydney
, and is one of very few artists who has been selected to participate in Documenta
on four separate occasions. Her solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
, "Rebecca Horn: Diving through Buster's Bedroom", featured eighteen large-scale mechanized sculptures that relate to the themes and content of the artist's feature-length film, Buster's Bedroom. In 1993 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
, New York, mounted a mid-career retrospective organized by Germano Celant
and Nancy Spector, which traveled to the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Neue Nationalgalerie
, Berlin; Kunsthalle Wien
, Vienna; Tate Gallery
and Serpentine Gallery
, London; and Musée de Grenoble
. In 2005 the Hayward Gallery
in London
held a comprehensive Rebecca Horn retrospective; in conjunction with this exhibition, St Paul's Cathedral
shoed show Horn's installation Moon Mirror.
, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
; the Art Gallery of New South Wales
, Australia; Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Turin, Italy; the Tate Gallery
, London; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
, San Francisco; the Centre Georges Pompidou
, Paris; the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe; the Stedelijk Museum
, Amsterdam; the Van Abbemuseum
, Eindhoven and many others.
in 1988, Horn won the Carnegie Prize for an installation work titled The Hyra Forest/Performing: Oscar Wilde. In 1992 Horn became the first woman to receive the prestigious Kaiserring Goslar, and was awarded the Medienkunstpreis Karlsruhe for achievements in technology and art. She was later awarded the 2010 Praemium Imperiale
in Sculpture and the Grande Médaille des Arts Plastiques 2011 from the Académie d’Architecture de Paris.
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
installation art
Installation art
Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...
ist and film director most famous for her body modifications such as Einhorn (Unicorn), a body-suit with a very large horn projecting vertically from the headpiece, and Pencil Mask, a mesh harness for the head with many pencils projecting out. She directed the films; Der Eintänzer (1978), La ferdinanda: Sonate für eine Medici-Villa (1982) and Buster's Bedroom
Buster's Bedroom
Buster's Bedroom is a 1990 independent German comedy film directed by Rebecca Horn. The film follows a young woman with an infatuation for Buster Keaton. The film was shown at the Marché du Film of the Cannes Film Festival in May 1990. Later that year it was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art,...
(1990). Horn presently lives and works in Paris and Berlin.
Early life and education
Rebecca Horn was born on March 23, 1944 in MichelstadtMichelstadt
Michelstadt in the Odenwald is a town in the Odenwaldkreis in southern Hesse, Germany between Darmstadt and Heidelberg.- Location :Michelstadt is the biggest town in the Odenwaldkreis and borders on the district seat of Erbach....
, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
. She was taught to draw by her Romanian governess and became obsessed with drawing as expression because it was not as confining or labeling as oral language. Living in Germany after the end of World War II greatly affected the liking she took to drawing. "We could not speak German. Germans were hated. We had to learn French and English. We were always traveling somewhere else, speaking something else. But I had a Romanian governess who taught me how to draw. I did not have to draw in German or French or English. I could just draw."
Horn spent most of her late childhood in boarding schools and at nineteen rebelled against her parents' plan of studying economics and decided to instead attend Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts. A year later she had to pull out of art school because she had contracted severe lung poisoning. 'In 1964 I was 20 years old and living in Barcelona, in one of those hotels where you rent rooms by the hour. I was working with glass fibre, without a mask, because nobody said it was dangerous, and I got very sick. For a year I was in a sanatorium. My parents died. I was totally isolated.” After experiencing this “total isolation” until she felt that her life was over before it had begun, she walked out of the hospital. She was still too ill, however, to resume life as a student or work with fiberglass and polyester. She had to take masses of antibiotics and sleep long hours to have enough energy to operate normally. She could, however, work with softer materials, and when in bed she drew with colored pencils (which are still her favorite drawing tools). She also began to slowly break out of her self-imposed isolation and began to create sculpture and strange extensions with balsa wood and cloth. “I began to produce my first body-sculptures. I could sew lying in bed." Her goal then was to quash her “loneliness by communicating through bodily forms.”
Horn lived in Hamburg until 1971, in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
for a brief time (1971–2), and since 1973 in Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
.
Work
Horn is one of a generation of German artists who came to international prominence in the 1980s. She practices body artBody art
Body art is art made on, with, or consisting of, the human body. The most common forms of body art are tattoos and body piercings, but other types include scarification, branding, scalpelling, shaping , full body tattoo and body painting.More extreme body art can involve things such as mutilation...
, but works in different media, including performance, installation art
Installation art
Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...
, sculpture
Sculpture
Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials—typically stone such as marble—or metal, glass, or wood. Softer materials can also be used, such as clay, textiles, plastics, polymers and softer metals...
, and film
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
. She also writes poetry. Sometimes her poetry is influenced by her work, and on many occasions her poetry has inspired her work. When Horn returned to the Hamburg academy she continued to make cocoon-like things. She worked with padded body extensions and prosthetic bandages. In the late sixties she began creating performance art and continued to use bodily extensions.
Body sculptures
In 1968 Horn produced her first body sculptures, in which she attached objects and instruments to the human body, taking as her theme the contact between a person and his or her environment. 'Einhorn (Unicorn)' is one of Horn’s best known performance piecesPerformance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
: a long horn worn on her head, its title a pun on the artist’s name. She presented Einhorn at the 1972 Documenta
Documenta
documenta is an exhibition of modern and contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. It was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau which took place in Kassel at that time...
. Its subject is a woman who is described by Horn as “very bourgeois” is “21 years-old and ready to marry. She is spending her money on new bedroom furniture,” walks through a field and forest on a summer morning wearing only a white horn protruding directly from the front of the top of her head and the straps holding it there. These straps are almost identical to the ones worn in Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo de Rivera was a Mexican painter, born in Coyoacán, and perhaps best known for her self-portraits....
’s painting Broken Column. The image, with wheat floating around the woman’s hips, is simultaneously mythic and modern.
'Pencil Mask' is another body extension piece, made up of six straps running horizontally and three straps running vertically. Where the straps intersect a pencil has been attached. When moving her face back and forth on a near a wall the pencil marks that are made correspond directly with her movements.
'Finger Gloves' is a performance piece and the main prop of that performance piece and was done in 1972. They are worn like gloves, but the finger form extends with balsa wood and cloth. By being able to see what she was touching and the way in which she was touching it, it felt as if her fingers were extended and in her mind the illusion was created that she was actually touching what the extensions were touching. There is another piece that she did that is very similar to this one. It is part of her Berlin Exercises series done in 1974 called “touching the walls with both hands simultaneously”. In this piece she made more finger extension gloves, but this time measured it so that they specifically fit the selected space. If the chosen participant stood in the middle of the room, they could exactly touch opposing walls simultaneously.
Another piece that involves the illusion of feeling and one’s hand is 'Feather Fingers.' (1972). A feather is attached to each finger with a metal ring. The hand becomes “as symmetrical (and as sensitive) as a bird’s wing”. When touching the opposite arm with these feather fingers one can feel the touch on the left arm and of the fingers on the right hand moving as if to touch the left arm but it is instead the feathers which make contact. Rebecca Horn describes the effect: “it is as if one hand had suddenly become disconnected from the other like two utterly unrelated beings. My sense of touch becomes so disrupted that the different behavior of each hand triggers contradictory sensations.” This piece focuses greatly on sensitivity.
Sculpture
Horn continued to explore the image of feathers in her works of the 1970s and 1980s. Many of her feathered pieces wrap a figure in the manner of a cocoon or function as masks or fans to cover or imprison the body. Some of these pieces are 'Cockfeather' (1971), 'Cockfeather Mask' (1973), 'Cockatoo Mask' (1973), 'Paradise Widow' (1975), and 'The Feathered Prison Fan' (1978) made for her film Die Eintänzer.Various "machines" are subject of Horn's work in the 1980s. Among others, she created a machine to mimic the human act of painting in The Little Painting School Performs a Waterfall (1988). Thirteen feet above the floor on a gallery wall, three fan-shaped paint brushes mounted on flexible metal arms slowly flutter down into cups filled with blue and green acrylic paint. After a few seconds of immersion they snap backward, spattering paint onto the wall, the ceiling, the floor, and onto canvases projected from the wall below. The brushes immediately resume their descent, and the cycle is repeated until each canvas is covered in paint.
In the 1990s a series of her impressive sculptures were presented in places of historical importance. Examples are the Tower of the Nameless in Vienna (1994), Concert in Reverse in Munich (1997), Mirror of the Night in an abandoned synagogue in Cologne (1998) and Concert for Buchenwald at Weimar (1999). In Weimar, the Concert for Buchenwald was composed on the premises of a former tram depot. The artist has layered 40 metre long walls of ashes behind glass, as archives of petrifaction. At the same time, the theme of bodily vitality, which the artist had been exploring since the seventies, was developed in site-specific installations that investigated the subject of the latent energy of places and the magnetic flows of space. This cycle comprises High Moon, New York (1991); El Reio de la Luna, Barcelona (1992); Spirit di Madreperla, Naples (2002). For the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, Horn was commissioned to create the steel sculpture L'Estel Ferit.
Many Horn works also explore ambiguities in the idea of lens
Lens (optics)
A lens is an optical device with perfect or approximate axial symmetry which transmits and refracts light, converging or diverging the beam. A simple lens consists of a single optical element...
es. One would think that a large tinted lens exists for protection and cover, but it also has the effect of drawing attention to the person or figure behind it. The paradox of looking out and looking back is explored in her installation piece for Taipei 101
Taipei 101
Taipei 101 , formerly known as the Taipei World Financial Center, is a landmark skyscraper located in Xinyi District, Taipei, Taiwan. The building ranked officially as the world's tallest from 2004 until the opening of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai in 2010...
, Dialogue between Yin and Yang (2002). The work sets up interactions between viewers, environment and sculpture as it uses binoculars and mirrors to suggest the passive and active energies
Yin and yang
In Asian philosophy, the concept of yin yang , which is often referred to in the West as "yin and yang", is used to describe how polar opposites or seemingly contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other in turn. Opposites thus only...
.
Film
In what amounted to over ten years of life in New York, Horn undertook the production of highly narrative, full-length films, and incorporated the sculptures and movements from her earlier work into this new context of film, transforming their significance. Horn made her first feature-length film in 1978, Der Eintänzer. Later films include La Ferdinanda: Sonata for a Medici Villa, and Buster's BedroomBuster's Bedroom
Buster's Bedroom is a 1990 independent German comedy film directed by Rebecca Horn. The film follows a young woman with an infatuation for Buster Keaton. The film was shown at the Marché du Film of the Cannes Film Festival in May 1990. Later that year it was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art,...
. La Ferdinanda is in German; the other films are in English. In all of these films though, Horn’s obsession with the imperfect body and the balance between figure and objects is apparent. She has also collaborated with Jannis Kounellis
Jannis Kounellis
Jannis Kounellis was born on March 23, 1936 in Piraeus, Greece. He studied in art college in Athens until 1956 and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome....
and produced some films, including the film Buster's Bedroom (1990) which was shot by the Academy Award-winning Sven Nykvist
Sven Nykvist
Sven Vilhem Nykvist was a Swedish cinematographer. He worked on over 120 films, but is known especially for his work with director Ingmar Bergman...
and stars Donald Sutherland
Donald Sutherland
Donald McNichol Sutherland, OC is a Canadian actor with a film career spanning nearly 50 years. Some of Sutherland's more notable movie roles included offbeat warriors in such war movies as The Dirty Dozen, , MASH , and Kelly's Heroes , as well as in such popular films as Klute, Invasion of the...
, Geraldine Chaplin
Geraldine Chaplin
Geraldine Leigh Chaplin is an English-American actress and the daughter of Charlie Chaplin.Chaplin first came to prominence for her Golden Globe-nominated role of Tonya in David Lean's Doctor Zhivago . She received her second Golden Globe nomination for Robert Altman's Nashville...
, and Martin Wuttke
Martin Wuttke
Martin Wuttke is a German actor and director who reached international recognition for his portrayal of Adolf Hitler in the 2009 film Inglourious Basterds.-Life and career:...
. For Buster’s Bedroom und Roussel, she collaborated with German writer Martin Mosebach
Martin Mosebach
Martin Mosebach , has published novels, stories, and collections of poems, written scripts for several films, opera libretti, theatre and radio plays....
on the respective screenplays.
Other projects
Rebecca Horn is the subject of a book entitled 'The Glance of Infinity'. In 2008 and 2009, Japanese artist Masanori Handa was mentored by Horn as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative.Exhibitions
When Harald SzeemannHarald Szeemann
Harald Szeemann was a Swiss curator and art historian.-Life:Szeemann was born in Bern. He studied art history, archaeology and journalism in Bern and Paris, and in 1956 he began working as an actor, stage designer and painter, as well as doing one-man shows. He started creating exhibitions in 1957...
invited Rebecca Horn to participate in the 1972 Documenta
Documenta
documenta is an exhibition of modern and contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. It was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau which took place in Kassel at that time...
in Kassel, she was a virtually unknown twenty-one year-old artist. Sigmar Polke
Sigmar Polke
Sigmar Polke was a German painter and photographer.Polke experimented with a wide range of styles, subject matter and materials. In the 1970s, he concentrated on photography, returning to paint in the 1980s, when he produced abstract works created by chance through chemical reactions between paint...
had performed in one of her piece Simon Sigmar in 1971, and it was through him that Szeeman heard of her. Horn later had her first solo exhibition at the Galerie René Block, West Berlin, in 1973. She has since participated in the Venice Biennale
Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...
, Skulptur Projekte Münster
Skulptur Projekte Münster
Skulptur Projekte Münster is an exhibition of sculptures in public places in the town of Münster...
, and the Biennale of Sydney
Biennale of Sydney
The Biennale of Sydney is an international festival of contemporary art, held every two years in Sydney, Australia. It is the largest and best-attended contemporary visual arts event in the country...
, and is one of very few artists who has been selected to participate in Documenta
Documenta
documenta is an exhibition of modern and contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. It was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau which took place in Kassel at that time...
on four separate occasions. Her solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles is a contemporary art museum with three locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near Walt Disney Concert Hall...
, "Rebecca Horn: Diving through Buster's Bedroom", featured eighteen large-scale mechanized sculptures that relate to the themes and content of the artist's feature-length film, Buster's Bedroom. In 1993 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is a well-known museum located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States. It is the permanent home to a renowned collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions...
, New York, mounted a mid-career retrospective organized by Germano Celant
Germano Celant
Germano Celant is an Italian art historian, critic and curator, mostly renewed for being one of the founding members of the "Arte Povera" movement in 1967....
and Nancy Spector, which traveled to the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Neue Nationalgalerie
Neue Nationalgalerie
Neue Nationalgalerie at the Kulturforum is a museum for modern art in Berlin, with its main focus on the early 20th century. It is part of the Nationalgalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin...
, Berlin; Kunsthalle Wien
Kunsthalle Wien
The Kunsthalle Wien is an institution in Vienna for temporary exhibitions of contemporary international art. It opened in 1992, and was originally located on Karlsplatz, in a container-shaped building designed as a temporary site by the Austrian architect Adolf Krischanitz...
, Vienna; Tate Gallery
Tate Gallery
The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...
and Serpentine Gallery
Serpentine Gallery
The Serpentine Gallery is an art gallery in Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, central London. It focuses on modern and contemporary art. The exhibitions, architecture, education and public programmes attract approximately 750,000 visitors a year...
, London; and Musée de Grenoble
Museum of Grenoble
The Museum of Grenoble is a city museum of Fine Arts and antiques in the city of Grenoble in France.Located on the left bank of the Isère, place Lavalette, it is known both for its collections of ancient art for its collections of modern and contemporary art..-History:The Museum of Grenoble was...
. In 2005 the Hayward Gallery
Hayward Gallery
The Hayward Gallery is an art gallery within the Southbank Centre, part of an area of major arts venues on the South Bank of the River Thames, in central London, England. It is sited adjacent to the other Southbank Centre buildings and also the Royal National Theatre and British Film Institute...
in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
held a comprehensive Rebecca Horn retrospective; in conjunction with this exhibition, St Paul's Cathedral
St Paul's Cathedral
St Paul's Cathedral, London, is a Church of England cathedral and seat of the Bishop of London. Its dedication to Paul the Apostle dates back to the original church on this site, founded in AD 604. St Paul's sits at the top of Ludgate Hill, the highest point in the City of London, and is the mother...
shoed show Horn's installation Moon Mirror.
Collections
Horn’s work is included in major public collections worldwide including the Solomon R. Guggenheim MuseumSolomon R. Guggenheim Museum
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is a well-known museum located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States. It is the permanent home to a renowned collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions...
, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles is a contemporary art museum with three locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near Walt Disney Concert Hall...
; the Art Gallery of New South Wales
Art Gallery of New South Wales
The Art Gallery of New South Wales , located in The Domain in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, was established in 1897 and is the most important public gallery in Sydney and the fourth largest in Australia...
, Australia; Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Turin, Italy; the Tate Gallery
Tate Gallery
The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...
, London; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a modern art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th century art...
, San Francisco; the Centre Georges Pompidou
Centre Georges Pompidou
Centre Georges Pompidou is a complex in the Beaubourg area of the 4th arrondissement of Paris, near Les Halles, rue Montorgueil and the Marais...
, Paris; the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe; the Stedelijk Museum
Stedelijk Museum
Founded in 1874, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam is a museum for classic modern and contemporary art in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. It has been housed on the Paulus Potterstraat, next to Museum Square Museumplein and to the Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh Museum and the Concertgebouw, in Amsterdam Zuid...
, Amsterdam; the Van Abbemuseum
Van Abbemuseum
Van Abbemuseum is a museum of modern and contemporary art located in central Eindhoven, Netherlands, on the east bank of the Dommel river. Established in 1936, the Abbe Museum is named after its founder, Abbe Henri. Abbe was a lover of modern art and wanted to enjoy it there from Eindhoven...
, Eindhoven and many others.
Recognition
At the Carnegie InternationalCarnegie International
The Carnegie International is the oldest North American exhibition of contemporary art from around the globe. It was first organized at the behest of industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie on November 5, 1896 in Pittsburgh. Carnegie established the International to educate and inspire the...
in 1988, Horn won the Carnegie Prize for an installation work titled The Hyra Forest/Performing: Oscar Wilde. In 1992 Horn became the first woman to receive the prestigious Kaiserring Goslar, and was awarded the Medienkunstpreis Karlsruhe for achievements in technology and art. She was later awarded the 2010 Praemium Imperiale
Praemium Imperiale
The Praemium Imperiale is an arts prize awarded since 1989 by the imperial family of Japan on behalf of the Japan Art Association in the fields painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and theatre/film...
in Sculpture and the Grande Médaille des Arts Plastiques 2011 from the Académie d’Architecture de Paris.