ART CITIES:N.York-Isa Genzken

With a career spanning over 40 years, Isa Genzken has incessantly probed the shifting boundaries between art, design, architecture, media, technology, and the individual. Her prodigious oeuvre frequently incorporates seemingly disparate materials and imagery to create complex, enigmatic works that range in medium, including sculpture, painting, collage, drawing, film, and photography.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery

Isa Genzken’s solo exhibition “Sky Energy” showcase the diversity of her practice and include a selection of new concrete sculptures, wall-mounted paintings and assemblages, and iterations of her ongoing “Schauspieler” series. The exhibition takes its name from a sketch for an unproduced screenplay written by the artist in the mid-1990s, “Sky (Fragments for a movie)”. Concerned with a dark secret hidden within a suburban home, the text underlines several themes that run through the works on view, such as the tension between public and private, and the deceptive nature of surfaces and facades. Having begun working with concrete in the mid-1980s, here Genzken revisits some of her most recognizable forms, including her “Paravents” and “Lautsprecher”. In these sculptures, the artist employs the rough-hewn surfaces of concrete to create works that appear at once heavy and light, modern and decrepit. These forms simultaneously point toward and confound notions of receptivity, communication, and openness that the artist has explored throughout her career. The exhibition feature new examples of Genzken’s “towers” products of her decades-long fascination with skyscrapers and New York City’s skyline in particular. At once makeshift and monumental, these architectonic forms consist of vertical structures of medium-density fiberboard adorned with mirror foil and spray paint, which, as in her concrete works, complicate the distinctions between interior and exterior space. Also on view are iterations of the artist’s ongoing “Schauspieler” series. First presented in her 2013 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, these works consist of elaborately outfitted mannequins holding an array of props and accessories. Styled by the artist somewhere between high-fashion models and post-apocalyptic survivors, these figures represent Genzken’s most explicit engagement with the human form, confronting viewers with a distorted reflection of the world around them. In addition, the exhibition  includes a range of assemblages of tape, foil, spray paint, and photographs on aluminum and plaster panels, many of which feature images (including an X-ray) of the artist and her work. Genzken also debut new hybrid forms that combine her “Schauspieler” figures with these wall-mounted panels, erasing the distinction between two- and three-dimensional works. Isa Genzken is a child of the ‘60s who embraced the sometimes violent leftist idealism of her generation. She was introduced to a circle of artists with radical ideals and practices, including: Sigmar Polke, Bruce Nauman, Dan Graham, Lawrence Weiner, and Gerhard Richter. The artist was in her late 20s when she began teaching sculpture at the Düsseldorf Academy, where she also received a travel grant to visit New York and Los Angeles. There she met with  Dan Graham, Lawrence Weiner, Michael Asher, and musician Kim Gordon, who would become lead guitarist in the band Sonic Youth in 1981. She describes her way of working with two quotes: “I like to put things together that were previously unconnected. This connection is like a handshake between people” and “I love being daring”. Genzken’s work has been part of the artistic discourse since she began exhibiting in the mid-1970s, but over the last decade a new generation has been inspired by her radical inventiveness. The past 10 years have been particularly productive for Genzken, who, with a new language of found objects and collage, has created several bodies of work that have redefined assemblage for a new era.

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 533 West 19th Street, New York, Duration: 22/2-17/4/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com