WUPPERTAL.- With the exhibition Rebecca Horn: Emotion in Motion, which opened recently, the Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden is presenting a comprehensive solo exhibition of works by the artist Rebecca Horn (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 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 fourteen works that Rebecca Horn made between the 1980s and the 2010s; among them, large-scale kinetic sculptures whose mechanical structures create sounds.       

These include the installation Tower of the Nameless, which Horn created in 1994 as a site-specific response to the war in Yugoslavia in a Viennese stairwell: The artist erected a tower of fruit ladders featuring motorised violins, which referenced the violin music played by refugees in the doorways and underground tunnels of Vienna, and invited these people to contribute their violin playing to the installation. The Prussian Bride Machine (1988), one of Horn’s painting machines, which illustrates her connection to Surrealism and the readymade.

Also on display is the installation Concert of Anarchy (2006), a concert grand piano hanging upside down from the ceiling, whose keyboard falls noisily out of the body of the instrument via the mechanics of pneumatic cylinders and is subsequently locked back inside it. Also on display is a kinetic floor sculpture from Horn’s latest series, Breathing Bodies (2017), whose tapered brass rods rotate almost imperceptibly in varying directions. Another Painting Machine (1999) rhythmically sprays black ink across the entire surface of a wall, creating a gestural image. The installation is accompanied by objects that explore the tension between aggression and tenderness, such as the kinetic sculpture Kiss of the Rhinoceros (1989), in which a flashing spark of light is generated when two arcs with metallic rhinoceros tips come together.