Rebecca Horn, the German set up artist identified for her surreal and sensual “artwork machines” incorporating musical devices, fowl feathers and mechanical engineering, has died aged 80, her basis has confirmed.
In keeping with the Moontower Basis, Horn’s dying was on Friday night in Unhealthy König, in her native western German Odenwald area.
Born in 1944, a 12 months earlier than the top of the second world conflict, 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 Sixties and Nineteen 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 turned a standard function: 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 similar to pianos and violins have been one other frequent part. 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 previous suitcase she had bought at a Berlin flea market.
One in all her best-known works, 1994’s Turtle Sighing Tree, is an outsized arboreal thicket made from copper pipes, emitting piercing screams and wails in several languages at common intervals.
Chatting with the Guardian in 2005, Horn mentioned 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 mentioned. “We needed to study French and English. We have been all the time travelling elsewhere, 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 facility as soon as owned by her household, at Unhealthy König. That is the Moontower Basis, devoted to preserving her works and supporting younger artists. All the time a personal particular person, Horn retreated from public life after struggling a stroke in 2015.
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