Isa Genzken is a German conceptual artist who transformed the concept of mixed media art through her radical use of materials. She uses cheap, mass-produced materials, scraps of paper, fragments of glass, and other objects to challenge the notion of sculpture and disassemble the creative hierarchies. In her 76 years, Genzken still remains one of the most influential and important German artists. Read on to learn 12 important facts about Isa Genzken and her art.
1. Isa Genzken Was Born in Post-War Germany
Isa Genzken was born in a small city Bad Oldesloe in Northern Germany in 1948. She spent most of her childhood in Hamburg and saw her country recover after the horrors of the Nazi regime, the bombings, and the years of propaganda. Her own family was deeply scarred by the horrific twists of German history from within: Genzken’s grandfather held a prominent post in the SS medical office and took part in experiments on concentration camp prisoners. By the court’s decision during the Nuremberg trial, he was imprisoned. The earliest memories of Genzken include her visits to her grandfather’s prison cell.
Her parents, however, had a more positive influence on her. They were both failed artists: the mother wanted to become an actress, and the father an opera singer. Both eventually entered the pharmaceutical industry but were never happy with the result. Thus, Genzken’s decision to follow her artistic aspirations was supported. During her entrance exam to the Hamburg University of Fine Arts, the examiners handed her a sheet of paper and a pencil to demonstrate her skills. Instead of drawing, she crumpled the paper and threw it at the table—and she was immediately accepted.
2. Her Art Is an Antithesis to Minimalism and Order
Genzken began her artistic career in the early 1970s and initially followed the dominating Minimalist trends of the era. Inspired by American and Early Soviet artists, she explored simple forms and concise artistic expressions. She created wooden sculptures carved according to precise mathematical calculations. However, as her artistic voice developed, she moved in the opposite direction. Instead of accepting the clear precision, she found excitement in the aesthetic of ruins, flaws, and handmade imperfections. Instead of polished surfaces and high-tech materials, she resorted to rough textures, cheap materials, and bold colors. In a way, the chaotically rich textures, kitschy colors, and crumbling ruins reflected Genzken’s childhood experience of seeing a space—a city or an entire country—falling apart, with humans settling in and making these ruins part of their home and history.
3. She Works With Mixed Media
Mixed media is a label that vaguely defines any work of art made by using more than one type of material or technique. Technically, Isa Genzken’s art falls into this category but simultaneously renders it useless due to her radical approach to combining materials. Apart from her work with sculptures, in the 1990s, she created decorative garments, covering shirts with paint, postcards, banknotes, and three-dimensional objects like broken CDs and coins. These works explored the capitalist understanding of good taste, beauty, and objects fit for consumption.
4. Mass Consumerism Moves Her Art Forward
After the war and until 1949, Hamburg and the territories around it were under British occupation and later became part of West Germany. She saw the rise of the capitalist system in the newly formed country and observed the transformation of the consumerist landscape. Rapid non-stop consumption, variety of cheap goods, and almost hysterical desire to own objects and interact with them force her to rethink those objects as artistic materials. Museum sculptures turn into reproducible images, and objects lose their individual value. The sheer amount of these objects on the market invalidates their expressive power, making them sterile bases for expression.
5. She Rejects the Readymade Label
Although many of Genzken’s works are combined from found objects, she rejects the artistic idea of readymade sculptures. Instead, she highlights the interaction of objects she uses and creates new contexts for them. Genzken uses mass-produced cheap objects that are decontextualized and devoid of any history or personal interaction. At the same time, all these objects, like plastic flowers or small toys, evoke vague associations with similar objects we encounter in our lives. Instead of placing a found object on an artistic pedestal as it is, Genzken forces it to create a context for other fragments.
6. Isa Genzken Often Refers to Patriarchal Stereotypes
Political messages, including those of feminist character, are an integral part of Genzken’s work. Particularly, her installation Ironing Board explored expressive possibilities of household objects. They symbolize both the invisible household labor mostly done by women and the neo-patriarchal structures that are still present in the contemporary world. The ironing board breaks under the pressure of a flower bouquet—another symbol of ideas related to traditional femininity. Yet the bouquet is fake and offers neither liberation nor comfort. The confines of pre-industrial patriarchy were seemingly broken, but the expectations from women somehow became even more complex.
7. She Was Married to Gerhard Richter
The famous Expressionist artist Gerhard Richter was Genzken’s art professor at the Dusseldorf Art Academy. Despite the age gap of sixteen years, the artists got married in 1982. For more than eleven years, they lived together and collaborated on many artistic projects, including designing underground stations in Germany. According to some experts, Genzken’s influence on Richter was, in some aspects (particularly, in the political one), more obvious than vice versa. However, in 1993, the couple got a divorce. The process was so difficult it led Genzken to develop an alcohol addiction and seek professional help.
8. She Witnessed the 9/11 Attack
During one of her many visits to New York in 2001, Isa Genzken witnessed the 9/11 attack. The crumbling towers reminded her of the trauma of her own native land and brought back memories of how ruins shape the environment and people living around them. Several years after the tragedy, she created several installations commemorating the attack. The Ground Zero series is a collection of tower-like structures, reimagining shared spaces that bring safety and comfort to the community shattered by the attack. They also explored the inevitable transformation of the tragedy into a commercialized media entity.
9. Isa Genzken Often Makes Public Art
Genzken often creates public art in addition to indoor installations. Her most famous works are seemingly fragile steel roses installed in spaces like parks and museums. The single-standing flowers tower over the area, evoking discussions on the relationship between humans and environments, natural and artificial. Her roses also question our perception of scale and texture.
10. Her Sculptures Have Non-Sculptural Qualities
Despite the use of concrete and glass, as well as the rather substantial size of her works, Genzken deliberately divorces them from the traditional understanding of sculpture. Traditional sculptural work is monumental and constructs hierarchical relationships between itself and its audience. Its materials (especially stone or metal) are physically and conceptually heavyweight and durable, made to last much longer than the artist who sculpted them or their public. Large-scale immovable sculptures, particularly monuments, also indicate authority as they transform the landscape and force the audiences to consider their presence.
Genzken’s sculptures deliberately reject this tradition. She refuses to employ traditional materials, instead building an egalitarian creative space from accessible materials. Rather than dominating the audiences, her works interact with them, creating an atmosphere of playful excitement. This atmosphere disarms the grave and conservative context of traditional sculpture and allows Genzken to pass her message openly.
11. She Flawlessly Manipulates Art Historical References
Despite her use of contemporary materials, Genzken is well-familiar with art history and its symbolic and decorative elements. Her 1998 installation Venice, created for the Venice Biennale, referred to the symbolic use of windows. In various eras of art history, they represented portals and possibilities, as well as limitations. In the works of women Impressionists like Berthe Morisot, windows acted as visible borders between the male world of streets, cabarets, and nightlife and the confines of feminine domesticity. Another reference here is the form of a folding screen, a popular decorative and functional object. However, due to the transparency of Genzken’s work, it fails to perform its function, so it offers to look closer through and behind it.
12. Isa Genzken Remains Critical Towards Her Predecessors
Genzken’s knowledge of the history of art leaves her free to criticize trends and ideas of the past. Particularly, she rejects the ideas of the Bauhaus school, known for its art and design philosophy of maximal functionality, clear lines and forms. Genzken devoted an entire series of works to breaking the rules of the famous school and assembling unstable and rough-looking sculptures from pizza boxes, seashells, tape, and stationery.
