IN SEARCH OF THE MECHANIZED SOUL

Rebecca Horn, one of the representative German artists emerging from the 1980s on the international stage, is exhibiting in Beijing a series of dynamic mechanical sculptures and gouache paintings created after 2000.

Her ongoing exhibition The Journey to China at Hua International is part of the Gallery Weekend Beijing, one of the major annual art events in the capital. It marks Horn's first solo exhibition in China. It is curated by Thomas Schulte, who is the principal of the artist's Berlin gallery.

Horn's mechanical installations, whether they are grand pianos suspended from ceilings or small, delicate objects, have become increasingly poetic in recent years. The artist suggests that they possess a soul because they move, tremble, faint, almost fall apart and then revive.

"They are not perfect machines," she says. "I am interested in the soul of things, not the machines themselves. I am interested in the story between the machine and its audience."

The core piece of the exhibition is The Burning Bush (2001), featuring metallic branches that extend upward and outward, moving slowly up and down nonstop.

In the exhibition, this piece interacts with another two artworks presented in large glass display cases, creating a sense of connection. The metal branches of The Burning Bush, the delicate bamboo tufts in The Two-Eyed Man (2019), and the rising, branching, dripping and rotating paint in the watercolor painting titled Blood Tree (2011) engage in what the artist says is a mutual dialogue.

In The Two-Eyed Man, a collage composed of bamboo branches, seashells, colored pencils, and a glass egg filled with sand fills the space with peaceful atmosphere. When the motor starts, the bamboo sways slowly, moving toward the tip of the large seashell, yet its sharp leaves never truly touch the shell.

The motifs present in the exhibition are also common in other works by Horn and form a significant part of her artistic language. They utilize various elements, resonating with Horn's broader body of work. For instance, the violin and bow behind the glass in the second display case of Forbidden Games — Lazlo's Violin (2019) echo her iconic installation pieces The Tower of the Nameless and Concert for Buchenwald.

Horn's career has witnessed a few major shifts. In the 1970s, her artistic works primarily focused on performance, body-related pieces, and experimental films. By the 1980s, she gradually switched focus to mechanical sculptures featuring symbolic movements. Since the 1990s, photo collages and watercolor paintings have also become significant aspects of her artistic practice.

Horn was born in Michelstadt, Germany, in 1944. In her childhood, her Romanian governess taught her how to paint. She says that she became enamored with painting emotionally, as it was not as limited as language.

Living in Germany after the end of World War II greatly influenced her love for painting. "We didn't speak German. We had to learn French and English. We were always traveling elsewhere, speaking other languages. But painting was never restricted to a language, German, French, or English."

Horn spent most of her time in boarding school, and at the age of 19, she defied her parents' wish for her to study economics and began studying art at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg instead. In 1964, she had to withdraw from the art school and stay in a sanatorium due to a severe lung infection.

While on a journey of slow recovery, Horn began to use soft materials to create sculptures. She lived in Hamburg until 1971 and, after a brief stay in London, settled in Berlin.

In the early 1970s, Horn began to perform her body extensions, attaching structures of various woods, metals, and fabrics to her body, such as swept canvas wings, tantalizing long-fingered gloves, masks covered in pencils, and towering unicorn horns.

Over the following years, the artist's work continued to expand from prosthetics to kinetic sculptures and installations, as well as films often featuring her moving sculptures.

In Horn's art piece Kiss of the Rhinoceros (1989), two large metal arms, each with a metal rhino horn at the end, form almost a full circle. The arms slowly pull apart, and when the horns touch at the top of the circle, a current flows between them. The piece "breathes with the rhythmic opening and closing of the steel arms".

"Horn's presentation of human body postures in the form of a semi-mechanical being comprising animal, metal, and mechanical parts, questions the primacy or purity of the human form," Melanie Kress, a contemporary art curator based in New York City, comments.

In addition to hosting significant solo exhibitions at prestigious international institutions such as the Tate Gallery in London, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the National Gallery in Berlin, Horn has also participated in many important events and group exhibitions, such as the Venice Biennale and the Carnegie International art exhibition.

Throughout her highly acclaimed career, Horn has received numerous awards, including the Praemium Imperiale Tokyo. In 2019, major retrospectives of her significant works were featured at the Museum Tinguely in Basel and the Pompidou-Metz branch. Her large-scale sculpture, The Milk of Dreams, was exhibited at the 59th Venice Biennale last year.

The Beijing exhibition will last until Aug 12.

If you go

Hua International, D08-3, 798 East Street, Art District 2, Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang district, Beijing.

10:30 am-6:30 pm, closed on Sunday and Monday, until Aug 12.