METZ.- The Centre Pompidou-Metz and Museum Tinguely in Basel present two parallel exhibitions devoted to the artist Rebecca Horn, offering complementary insights into the work of an artist who is among the most extraordinary of her generation . The exhibition Theatre of Metamorphoses explores in Metz the diverse theme of transformation from animist, surrealist and mechanistic perspectives, placing special emphasis on the role of film as a matrix within Horn’s work. In the Body Fantasies show in Basel, which combines early performative works and later kinetic sculpture to highlight lines of development within her oeuvre, the focus is on transformation processes of body and machine.
The exhibition Theatre of Metamorphoses at the Centre Pompidou-Metz highlights the rich range of forms of expression used by the artist. Following a lung illness, Rebecca Horn used the body as her preferred material in her works. Through her taste for paradoxical associations, she tirelessly makes theatre out of the oppositions which are inherent in our lives: subject and object, body and machine, human and animal, desire and violence, strength and infirmity, harmony and disorder. The living and the inert appear transfigured, the object is endowed with a soul, the individual is characterised by his physical frailty and his capacity to reinvent himself. From there is born the troubling strangeness of her work.
Rebecca Horn perpetuates in a unique manner, the themes bequeathed to us by mythology and fairytales, such as metamorphosis into a hybrid or mythical creature, the secret life of the world of objects, the secrets of alchemy, or the fantasies of body-robots. She makes these founding themes, which have been present in numerous currents of art history such as Mannerism or Surrealism, resonate with contemporary history. The exhibition underlines the contribution of the artist’s spiritual peers who have nourished her imagination: Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Meret Oppenheim and Constantin Brâncuşi. Her films are underpinned with a liberating and anarchic energy where poetry and humour often defuse the underlying violence. Firstly, they aimed at documenting her intimist and physical performances, then progressively set themselves free in order to become the privileged arena where the mechanised sculptures and the actors engaged in narratives which are both tragi-comic and surreal.
From an intimist theatre inhabited by her injured body, she gradually opened up to the world in order to make it more sensitive to the tribulations and uprooting of men displaced by conflicts and exile, as in her work Bee’s planetary map , with reference to exile and to those “who have lost their stability”.Rebecca Horn puts up the “ movement of evasion” which is running through the world, “a stability, a place where people can retreive their identity” 1. She expresses the power of art, as a primordial expression of the life of the consciousness of oneself beyond all limits. This exhibition is an invitation to share this discernible stage so that it becomes for the visitor-spectator “the free space of his own imagination” 2.
Curators: Emma Lavigne Director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz – Alexandra Müller, Head of research and of exhibitions, Centre Pompidou-Metz
