Background
Isa Genzken was born on November 27, 1948 in Bad Oldesloe, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.
Isa Genzken was born on November 27, 1948 in Bad Oldesloe, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.
Isa studied fine arts and art history at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts in 1968 – 1971 and the Berlin University of the Arts during 1971 – 1973. In 1973 she moved to Arts Academy Düsseldorf while also studying art history and philosophy at the University of Cologne.
In the 1970s, Genzken began working with wood that she carved into unusual geometric shapes such as hyperboloids and ellipsoids. In the photographs of her Hi-Fi-Serie, created in 1979, she reproduced advertisements for stereo phonographs. Although Isa's primary focus is sculpture, she has created various media including photography, film, video, works on paper, works on canvas with oil, collages, collage books, film scripts, and even a record. Despite her diverse work, she is a traditional sculptor at heart. Using plaster, cement, building samples, photographs, and bric-a-brac, Genzken creates architectonic structures that have been described as contemporary ruins. The column is a recurring motif for Genzken, a “pure” architectural trope on which to explore relationships between “high art” and the mass-produced products of popular culture.
After graduating in 1977, Genzken taught sculpture at the academy. Moreover, Genzken was a guest professor at Berlin University of the Arts in 1990, and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt in 1991 – 1992. She has worked in studios in Düsseldorf, Cologne; for short stretches in the United States, in Lower Manhattan and Hoboken, New Jersey; and currently in Berlin. After her divorce from Richter, she moved from the Rhineland region back to Berlin.
In 1980, Genzken and her husband were commissioned to design the König-Heinrich-Platz underground station in Duisburg. The work was completed in 1992. Between 1986 and 1992, Genzken conceived her series of plaster and concrete sculptures to investigate architecture. In 1986, Genzken's architectural references switched from the 1910s, 20s and 30s to the 1950s, 60s and 70s. In 1990 she installed a steel frame, "Camera" on a Brussels gallery’s rooftop, offering a view of the city below. In 2000, a series of architectural models roughly patched together, was inscribed with "Fuck the Bauhaus." Later, in the series "New Buildings for Berlin", which was shown at Documenta 11, Genzken designed architectural visions of glass high-rises.
Isa's work entitled "Der Spiegel" was created in 1989 - 1991 and is a series of images comprising 121 reproductions of black and white photographs selected and cut from German newsweekly Der Spiegel. Her paintings of suspended hoops, collectively entitled "More Light Research", recall gymnastics apparatus caught mid-swing and frozen in time. While her being in New York for several months in 1995 Genzken created a three-volume collage book entitled "I Love New York, Crazy City", a compendium of souvenirs from her various stays in the city, including photographs of Midtown's architecture, snapshots, maps, hotel bills, nightclub flyers, and concert tickets, among others.
One of Genzken's best known works, "Rose", created during 1993 - 1997, is a public sculpture of a single long-stemmed rose made from enamelled stainless steel that towers eight metres above Leipzig’s museum district. The artist's first public artwork in the United States, her replica "Rose II" was installed outside the New Museum as part of a year-long rotating installation in November 2010. Genzken has also produced numerous films, including "Zwei Frauen im Gefecht", "Chicago Drive", "Meine Großeltern im Bayerischen Wald", and the video "Empire/Vampire, Who Kills Death." Since the end of the second half of the 1990s, Genzken has been conceptualizing sculptures and panel paintings in the shape of a bricolage of materials taken from DIY stores and from photographs and newspaper clippings.
Genzken represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Her recent shows included collaborative work with Kai Althoff and Wolfgang Tillmans, in whose exhibition space "Between Bridges" she exhibited in 2008. Currently, Genzken's work is included in the collections of many institutions internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh; the Generali Foundation in Vienna; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington; the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden; and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
Drawing loosely on the legacies of Constructivism and Minimalism and often involving a critical, open dialogue with Modernist architecture, her interest lies in the way in which common aesthetic styles come to illustrate and embody contemporary political and social ideologies.
Genzken has bipolar disorder and goes through manic and depressive phases. She is the artist prepared to risk everything in her pursuit of artistic renewal.
Isa married German visual artist Gerhard Richter in 1982 and moved to Cologne in 1983. The couple separated in 1993.
