Rebecca Horn, the German set up artist identified for her surreal and sensual “artwork machines” incorporating musical devices, chicken feathers and mechanical engineering, has died aged 80, her basis has confirmed.
In keeping with the Moontower Basis, Horn’s demise was on Friday night in Dangerous König, in her native western German Odenwald area.
Born in 1944, a yr earlier than the tip of the second world struggle, Horn studied in Hamburg and London earlier than making herself a reputation as an artist in New York and Paris.
Her early work bore the hallmark of the Fluxus motion: within the late Nineteen Sixties and Seventies she labored on Unicorn, a fancy dress for a fellow scholar whom she despatched on a semi-naked stroll via the woods one summer season morning.
Masks and headdresses grew to become a standard characteristic: in 1972 she made Pencil Masks a piece adorned with spike-like pencils, instructing its wearers to maneuver their heads rhythmically from left to proper in entrance of a white canvas wall.
Musical devices comparable to pianos and violins have been one other widespread element. In 1992, Horn took up singer Peter Gabriel’s fee to visualise his track Secret World, constructing an set up with a violin bow and opera binoculars inside an outdated suitcase she had bought at a Berlin flea market.
Considered one of her best-known works, 1994’s Turtle Sighing Tree, is an outsized arboreal thicket manufactured from copper pipes, emitting piercing screams and wails in numerous languages at common intervals.
Talking to the Guardian in 2005, Horn stated she had been drawn to visible artwork partly due to the troubled historical past of her native German language. “We couldn’t communicate German, Germans have been hated,” she stated. “We needed to be taught French and English. We have been all the time travelling some place else, talking one thing else. However I had a Romanian governess who taught me how to attract. I didn’t have to attract in German or French or English. I may simply draw.”
In addition to installations and sculptures, Horn additionally produced literary texts and screenplays, and directed movies and operas. Her 1990 indie comedy Buster’s Bed room, starring Donald Sutherland and Geraldine Chaplin, paid homage to slapstick icon Buster Keaton, a lifelong inspiration for her work.
In 2007, Horn arrange a studio inside a manufacturing unit as soon as owned by her household, at Dangerous König. That is the Moontower Basis, devoted to preserving her works and supporting younger artists. All the time a non-public individual, Horn retreated from public life after struggling a stroke in 2015.
