Footnotes

Provenance
Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin
Vanthournot Collection, Belgium (acquired from the above in 1994)
Sale: Sotheby's, New York, Contemporary Art / Afternoon, 15 November 2006, Lot 412
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner


Rebecca Horn has left an indelible mark on the canon of art history as one of the most versatile and innovative artists emerging from Germany in the post-War era. Her practice is immensely diverse, employing a variety of media – from drawing to installation, writing to filmmaking – that has earned her enormous regard in academic and critical circles, culminating in her representing Germany at the 1997 Venice Biennale. Her kinetic sculptures remain some of the most organic and affective works the artist has produced, and the solemn beauty of Turm der Fliehenden Bücher from 1994, is no exception.

Emerging in the late 1960s, Horn was part of a generation of artists whose work challenged the institutions and structures that had governed not only the art world, but society at large. Her work has prodded at notions of control, expression, and hierarchies of power, remaining one of the most visceral, captivating bodies of work produced by any artist in the postmodern period.

Born in 1944, she grew up in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It influenced her greatly and would ultimately shape her mythologies and experimental practices in art. As a child, having been taught French and English rather than her native German, language was a fluid medium for Horn, who developed an acute feeling for drawing as her chosen artistic syntax; to her it was a medium that remained universal.

In 1964, however, as a young art and philosophy student at Hamburg's Hochschule für bildende Künste, her working with toxic polyester and fibreglass dealt an early blow to her life and work, suffering serious lung poisoning. She spent a year in hospital recovering, emerging with a determination to put her body at the centre of her art. With a renewed focus on the phenomenological experience, Horn rebuffed the commodity fetish of the art object, and engaged with a notion of artmaking as an endeavour that harbours, not only unforeseen risks, but a series of psychological and physical obstacles. The subjective experience became her chosen instrument.

She worked with soft materials, padded body extensions and prosthetic bandages, inspired by her convalescence in hospital. In 1968 Horn produced her first body sculptures, in which she attached objects, materials and instruments to the human body, taking as her theme the contact between a person, their environment and surrounding space. Einhorn is one of Horn's best known performance pieces comprising of a long horn worn on her head.

While it was mainly through her early performances that she explored the relationship between body and space, in her later work, the human body was replaced by kinetic sculptures. In the early 1980s, Horn began making these kinetic sculptures that moved by the force of a motor, taking on their own life and eliminating the need for the body to animate the her materials and shapes. The present work, Turm der Fliehenden Bücher from 1994, comprises of metal rods stacked tall against one another which in turn support three motors each of which has an open book and feather attached. Animated by the motors, the feathers flutter and softly rustle the pages of the texts that are splatted with ink.

"For me, all of these machines have a soul because they act, shake, tremble, faint, almost fall apart, and then come back to life again. They are not perfect machines. ...I'm interested in the soul of a thing, not the machine itself. ...It's the story between the machine and its audience that interests me" (the artist in: Rebecca Horn, New York 1993, p. 18).

Feathers first began appearing in Horn's work as components in elaborate props and costumes, even becoming the sculptures in their own right. Feathers and other materials that were used in her kinetic sculptures could be liberated from their ordinarily defined materiality and transposed into ever-changing metaphors that touched on mythical, historical, literary and spiritual imagery.

Literature and poetry also held important prominence in Horn's work; her own written poetry often inspired her work and she encouraged the viewer to constantly consider the important relationship between art and literature. She felt that viewers would consider a painting as art and a book as literature, but by combining the two in a single work, Horn asks us to consider these definitions and how the two relate and interact.

The author, Jeanette Winterson, has described Horn as performing a role akin to an artist-inventor or alchemist, and as possessing an ability to produce artworks that conjure powerful forces and emotions. Horn's work resides in many major public institutions worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Tate Collection, London, the Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, among many others. She is one of very few artists whom have been selected to participate in Documenta on four separate occasions. During the last six decades Rebecca Horn has become a key figure in a moment for art that challenged and changed formal ideas.