Rebecca Horn - Body Fantasies

Museum Tinguely in Basel and Centre Pompidou-Metz present two parallel exhibitions devoted to the artist Rebecca Horn, offering complementary insights into the work of an artist who is among the most extraordinary of her generation. In the Body Fantasies show in Basel, which combines early performative works and later kinetic sculpture to highlight lines of development within her oeuvre, the focus is on transformation processes of body and machine. The exhibition Theatre of Metamorphoses explores in Metz the diverse theme of transformation from animist, surrealist and mechanistic perspectives, placing special emphasis on the role of film as a matrix within Horn’s work.

Rebecca Horn. Body Fantasies at Museum Tinguely, Basel Horn’s work is always inspired by the human body and its movement. In her early performative pieces of the 1960s and ’70s, this is expressed via the use of objects that serve as both extensions and constrictions of the body. Since the 1980s, her work has consisted primarily of kinetic machines and, increasingly, large-scale installations that “come alive” thanks to movement, the performing body being replaced by a mechanical actor. These processes of transformation between expanded bodies and animated machines in Horn’s oeuvre, which now spans five decades, are the focus of the Basel show.

Although in terms of materiality the mechanical constructions with their cold metal contrast starkly with Horn’s earlier body extensions made using fabric and feathers, they do pursue and develop their specific movements. The Body Fantasies exhibition juxtaposes performative works and later machine sculptures in order to follow the unfolding development of such motifs of movement. Divided up into four themes (Flapping Wings, Circulating, Inscribing, Touching) the Basel show traces the development of her works as “stations in a process of transformation” (Rebecca Horn), emphasizing this continuity in her work.

This major solo exhibition of her work—that includes body instruments and actions, films, kinetic sculptures and installations—is the first of its kind in Switzerland for more than 30 years, taking place at Museum Tinguely from June 5 to September 22, 2019.

The exhibition Body Fantasies in Basel is curated by Sandra Beate Reimann.

Centre Pompidou-Metz, Rebecca Horn - Theatre of Metamorphoses
June 8, 2019–January 13, 202
link: Rebecca Horn. Theatre of Metamorphoses - Centre Pompidou-Metz, - in kunstaspekte