On display 35 works including installations, sculptures, videos, films and drawings
Impenetrable and refined, with “a certain air of aloofness and unrest”, Rebecca Horn (Michelstadt, 1944 - Bad König, 2024) was, for over half a century, one of the most significant figures on the international art scene and the first woman to receive the Carnegie Prize (1989). She worked in New York, Paris, Venice, and Berlin. As in the finest tradition of 1970s body art, the body becomes a tool of expression, but her approach was immediately eccentric, far from mere provocation. Horn was an artist of lateral thinking, moving in poetic, ethereal dimensions that were at once disturbingly precise. Her work unfolds like an initiatory journey, visually incorporating a continuous flow of emotional and conceptual associations, deeply rooted in her early readings about alchemy and surrealist machiner.
Her imaginary realm blends fictional and dreamlike realities where machine-objects unfold
A pivotal experience: her illness. As a teenager, she spent a year in a sanatorium due to lung damage caused by fiberglass exposure. At the same time, she suffered the loss of her parents, a profound solitude that shaped her life and art. Like many artists, she turned her suffering into creative force. She staged strange characters halfway between reality and fable, alien-like beings; she dressed in plumage and artificial extensions to re-explore space, to investigate, in a Kafkaesque fashion, themes of transformation, incommunicability, and reconnection. She invented a new semantic structure by weaving her imagery with emotional and symbolic threads, creating fictional and dreamlike realities where machine-objects (often kinetic) unfold: violins, pianos, staircases, metal beds, and many other elements become part of her visual language. One year after her death, the Museo di Rivoli, in collaboration with Haus der Kunst in Munich, has set up the first retrospective of her work in Italy. Curated by Marcella Beccaria, the exhibition is hosted in the Manica Lunga and includes 35 works: installations, sculptures, videos, films, and drawings, spanning from her early creations to more recent pieces.
She was an artist of lateral thinking, projecting herself into poetic dimensions surgically precise and unsettling
Giving the show its title is the installation “Cutting Through the Past” (1992–93): five wooden doors slowly rotate, incised by metallic arms. The wood yields to pressure, it wears down, it resists. Time is no longer linear, repetition becomes slow, ritualistic. “The machines react the way we do”, the artist once said. “I don’t want them to work forever. It’s part of their life that they stop and collapse”. Let’s hope she was wrong: it’s impossible not to grow attached to those tightrope walkers of the unreal, delicate yet violent, precursors of the future, who have explored the emotional weight of being alive - and continue to do so - with an extraordinary leap of the imagination, balanced on the edge of wondrous or terrifying metamorphoses.
A decisive moment in her artistic path her teenage stay in a sanatorium
