Isa Genzken

Isa Genzken's sculpture is concerned with what surrounds us and shapes our everyday existence, from design, advertising, and the media to her most enduring subject, architecture and the urban environment. The artist is interested in the ways in which aesthetic styles—the unadorned angularity of modernist architecture for example—embody and enforce political and social ideologies. Genzken began the Empire/Vampire, Who Kills Death sculptures shown here after the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. In this series, she directly confronts the themes of architecture, power, and terror. Much like scenes from a film, these sculptures comprise self-contained stages for invented scenarios: ruins of architecture and the built environment are peopled with figures trying to navigate the devastation. The materials seem scavenged from the detritus of some post-apocalyptic landscape; old sneakers, gnarled metal, discarded clothing, and mirrored tiles are arranged in dioramas depicting turbulent struggles within the ruins of an industrialized society. The twisted, gouged, crumbling forms seem to embody a sense that humanity can be felled by the very buildings we construct to shelter us.

Selected Bibliography:

Isa Genzken: 1992–2003. Exhibition catalogue. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, in association with Kunsthalle Zurich, and Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach, Germany, 2003.

Isa Genzken: Wolfgang-Hahn-Preis 2002. Exhibition catalogue. Cologne: Gesellschaft für moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig e.V., 2002.

Parkett, no. 69 (2004): 62–103. Special section, including essays by Jörg Heiser, Michael Krajewski, and Pamela M. Lee.

Seidel, Martin. "Isa Genzken: Stadtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach." Kunstforum International 163 (January–February 2003): 312–14.

Williams, Gregory. "Isa Genzken: Kunsthalle Zurich." Artforum 42, no. 1 (September 2003): 234–35.

Links:

ShanghART

Artnet