2023-07-14 14:30:22
Is Isa Genzken the best, the most important, the greatest living German artist? This is a question that has been asked for a long time; now you have to. Whereby superlatives in art, where obstinacy and irreplaceability rule, actually make no sense. But Genzken would definitely qualify. She started out as a sculptor and took part in the Documenta three times and the Venice Art Biennale five times, where she represented Germany in 2007.
The Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin is showing 75 works on Genzken’s 75th birthday in the glass case of Mies van der Rohe, who, when it comes to presenting art, is both a challenge and sometimes an impertinence. The light inside does whatever the sky above Berlin wants, and what used to exist in medium-sized museum rooms and galleries looks like flotsam washed up on the cliffs of post-war modernism in the wide hall.
The director of the Neue Nationalgalerie, Klaus Biesenbach, and the curator Lisa Botti have chosen an open, radically equal approach – the grid. The show “75/75” is strictly chronologically laid out as a kind of chessboard of plastics and assemblages, all at a reasonable distance from one another. Nothing is pushed together, nothing overly staged, no connections are claimed. Since there are no partitions, you can see everything at the same time and yet you can devote yourself to each work individually.
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Which one likes to do, because these works each have their own personality. They are like little riddles that play with perception and entangle everything around them. For example, there is the window frame made of epoxy resin – “window” from 1992.
It has three wings and creates new images itself by framing reality. In this case, it is the more than eight meter tall “Pink Rose” made of steel, which is planted in front of the National Gallery and which has a healing and grotesque effect in the urban space.
“Window” in the exhibition “Isa Genzken. 75/75”
Source: National Gallery – State Museums in Berlin/Jens Ziehe/Courtesy Galerie Buchholz/© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023
Epoxy resin is also the material of works from the nineties such as “Lamp”, “Heads in Aspic”. The synthetic resin is solid like wood or stone, but also transparent. Depending on the incidence of light, the columns appear opaque or transparent, shimmering in color like a church window. The material optically distorts what was previously sunk into it. Not only the composition, but also the choice of materials gives Genzken’s work something unfinished.
Since 2000 she has moved away from the one-piece sculpture and made assemblages of many parts that merge with their base or lie around on the floor. Sometimes that’s a used bike next to a mannequin, like in 2018’s Untitled.
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A day with Klaus Biesenbach
Critics often wonder why Genzken uses so much so-called “trash” in her works, which are highly valued on the art market – packaging materials, mirror foil, shower curtains, umbrellas, plastic figurines and bright spray paint are used. She started out in the mid-1970s with an American-influenced minimalism, with computer-calculated wooden sculptures and “world receivers” made of concrete.
But what actually is trash? What you can’t buy at Manufactum? What the educated citizen does not let into the apartment? Anything associated with fast consumption, underclass, or forms of exaltation? Why should one material per se be more worthy than another?
“Nefertiti – The Original” by Isa Genzken
Source: National Gallery – State Museums in Berlin/Jens Ziehe/Courtesy Galerie Buchholz/© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023
Genzken quickly emancipated himself from modern orthodoxy. With the series “Fuck the Bauhaus” she created three-dimensional collages in 2000 – consisting of pizza boxes, plywood and photographs, held together with colorful adhesive tape. They are works that look like daredevil buildings and yet are made of cheap materials.
But these materials are by no means garbage, as they have their own advantages – flexibility, great colourfulness, reflectivity, availability, strangeness. They bring the outside in, the world of the city into the studio. Genzken’s sculptures, which are often reminiscent of architecture, are also suggestions for making social space different, more playful, more open, more fun, more queer. She plays with standards and classification systems and with the cultural heritage that others only want to conserve.
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In 2002, Isa Genzken presented drafts for new architecture at Documenta 11 in Kassel, “New Buildings for Berlin”. These models are nothing but glass plates leaning against each other, which in their weightlessness evoke Mies van der Rohe’s high-rise design for Friedrichstrasse from 1921. As is well known, it was never built.
The Berlin of the last few decades has preferred the loophole facades and the shell limestone instead of transparent, colourful, urban, hedonistic-elegant architecture. Life-unfriendly, straight-angled, deadly boring architecture that claims solidity and yet consists primarily of capital and insulation.
Isa Genzken’s “Pink Rose” in front of the New National Gallery in Berlin
Source: National Gallery – State Museums in Berlin/Jens Ziehe/Courtesy Galerie Buchholz/© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023
In the New National Gallery you can now see Genzken’s utopian glass house of cards shimmering in the light, behind it the busy Potsdamer Strasse and the golden yellow of Scharoun’s State Library from 1978 and you feel a wild pain. Everything could be completely different! It’s not her fault.
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Isa Genzken, born in Bad Oldesloe in 1948, represents a different side of German art that is not charged with pretentious gestures of significance. Sigmar Polke comes to mind first, the quicksilver experimenter who liked to mingle with normal people in Cologne and remained unapproachable for the company.
Like Polke, Genzken studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy after having worked in Hamburg and Berlin. In 1982 she married her professor Gerhard Richter, in 1993 the marriage was divorced. Isa Genzken moves from Cologne to Berlin and, as one reads, went out a lot.
Isa Genzken, photographed by Wolfgang Tillmans
Source: ©Wolfgang Tilmans/Courtesy Galerie Buchholz
She has a keen sense of the fluidity and informal social encounters of nightlife, particularly Schöneberg’s gay nightlife. But the many wild stories that are told about Isa Genzken today never come without loving respect. Despite escapades and health crises, her work does not weaken, you can see that again in “75/75”.
The oeuvre remains open, decisive and contemporary. It is therefore a fitting turn of events that Gerhard Richter has had his own room in the basement of the National Gallery since April. The works of the former companions have now been standing back to back for a few months, just vertically. It’s a reunion of equals.
„Isa Genzken 75/75“New National Gallery Berlin, until November 27, 2023
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