WUPPERTAL.- Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden in Wuppertal presents a Rebecca Horn retrospective. With the exhibition "Rebecca Horn. Emotion in Motion" opening March 2026, Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden presents a comprehensive solo exhibition of works by artist Rebecca Horn, who died in September 2024 (1944-2024). This retrospective brings together large-format installations and kinetic sculptures from over the course of four decades — showcasing the complex, multi-medial work of one of the most important German artists of the 20th century. The exhibition is the product of close cooperation with the Moontower Foundation, which Rebecca Horn founded in 2007 to manage and care for her artistic oeuvre after her death. The foundation's mission is to foster artists and to keep Horn's work alive by making it accessible to a broad audience.

Rebecca Horn was born in Michelstadt, in Germany's southwestern Odenthal region, in 1944. Horn made her first body works while studying at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (HFBK). The toxicity of the production process, however, which involved making synthetic casts, poisoned the artist, leading to a long period of hospitalization. It was from this period of drawn out isolation that Rebecca Horn's Körperextensionen (Body Extensions) arose: Objects, extensions of the human body that Horn presented during performances. It is here that the issues of the frailty, vulnerability and spatial limitations of human existence become a central focus of her work. Horn translated questions probing the physical and metaphysical circumstances of being, of longing and desire, into kinetic objects, paintings, graphic works, poetry, film and performance, on stage sets or in site-specific installations.

Created over six decades, the works of Horn's oeuvre are connected by their materials, mechanisms and functions, or through the reuse of individual elements, becoming one on a symbolic level through the balance of the material and the poetic.

The exhibition at Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden features thirteen works that Rebecca Horn made between the 1980s and the 2010s; among them, large-scale kinetic sculptures whose mechanical structures create sounds.

One point of special interest in the upper exhibition space is the work Turm der Namenlosen (Tower of the Nameless), a site-specific installation that Horn created in a Vienna staircase in reaction to the 1994 Yugoslav Wars: In it, the artist erected a tower of fruit-picking ladders outfitted with motorized violins that recalled the music played by refugees in Vienna's house entrances and subway stations at the time, inviting those people in turn to join in the music making. The work is accompanied by Preußischen Brautmaschine (Prussian Bride Machine) from 1988, among others, it is one of Horn's numerous drawing machines and as such underscores references to both Surrealism and the Readymade.

The central exhibition hall features Rebecca Horn's 2006 installation Concert for Anarchy, in which a concert piano is suspended upside-down from the ceiling, its lids opening and keyboard noisily thrust out from within it, then sucked back in and closed with the help of a pneumatic pump. A kinetic floor sculpture from Hauchkörper (Breathing Bodies), Horn's most recent series of works from 2017, accompanies the work with its pointed brass rods shifting direction so slowly as to be barely perceptible.

In the lower hall, Horn's 1999 Malmaschine (Painting Machine) rhythmically sprays black ink across the entire surface of one of the space's walls, creating a gestural image. This installation is accompanied by objects that span the arc from the aggressive to the tender, like the 1989 kinetic sculpture Kuss der Rhinozeros (Kiss of the Rhinoceros), which emits sparks of light when contact is made between two arms outfitted with metallic rhinoceros horns.

Quiet, small-format works in which Rebecca Horn directed her gaze upon nature are collected in Villa Waldfrieden: Parrot Wings Blue from 1993 uses a motorized brass mechanism to slowly move bird feathers mounted to it in a way that mimics the soft glide of a bird in flight; while at the same time, the light grey lava stone in Magic Rock from 2005 regularly splits open to expose a piece of rock crystal buried within.

Rebecca Horn's works have been exhibited around the world. At documenta 5 in 1972, Horn showed her Körperextensionen (Body Extensions) for the first time. In 1993, she became the first woman ever given a retrospective at New York's Guggenheim Museum. Horn was also the recipient of numerous international honors and awards, among the most recent:

Praemium Imperiale for Sculpture (Tokyo, 2010), Grande Médaille des Arts Plastiques (Paris, 2011), Orden Pour le Mérite for Art and Science (Berlin, 2016) and the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize (Duisburg, 2017).