PRESENTATION: Isa Genzken

Isa Genzken’s work draws upon everyday material culture, including design, consumer goods, the media, architecture, and urban environments. Widely recognized for her significant, pioneering contribution to sculpture, her prodigious oeuvre also includes paintings, collages, drawings, films, and photographs, and frequently incorporates seemingly disparate materials and imagery to create characteristically complex, enigmatic works.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive

Drawing loosely on the legacies of Constructivism and Minimalism and often involving a critical, open dialogue with modernist architecture, Isa Genzken  interrogates the way in which common aesthetic styles come to illustrate and embody contemporary political and social ideologies.  The first solo exhibition of Isa Genzken in Greater China I on show at David Zwirner Gallery in Hong Kong. With a career spanning more than four decades, Genzken has incessantly probed the shifting boundaries between art, design, architecture, technology, and the individual. Her prodigious oeuvre frequently incorporates seemingly disparate materials and imagery to create complex, enigmatic works that range in media, including sculpture, painting, collage, drawing, film, and photography. Deeply attuned to both the legacies of the twentieth-century avant-garde and the materials and forms of twenty-first-century global society, Genzken’s work viscerally interrogates the impact of our increasingly commodified and interconnected culture on our everyday lives. The exhibition presents key works from the past ten years of Genzken’s career. Among the selection on view is an installation of Genzken’s recent “tower” and “column” sculptures. These works stem from the artist’s decades-long fascination with architecture and urban skylines. At once makeshift and monumental, these architectonic forms consist of vertical structures of medium-density fiberboard adorned with mirror foil, spray paint, and other media, complicating the distinctions between surface and depth, and interior and exterior space. Engaging the architectural and sculptural histories of modernism, the towers and columns are physically imposing, yet the materials and their human scale allude to the inherent vulnerability of the modern built environment. In addition, several freestanding floor sculptures are on view that belong to Genzken’s “Schauspieler” series, which debuted as part of her retrospective organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2013. The series, consisting of elaborately outfitted mannequins holding an array of props and accessories, signaled a notable shift in Genzken’s practice: with the mannequin functioning as the sculpture’s base, the artist employs a figurative idiom—making these works her most explicit engagement with the human form—in contrast to the abstract and geometric modes that characterized her earlier sculptures.The exhibition also features wall-mounted works that expand upon the artist’s fascination with the relationship between architecture, art, commercial goods, and everyday experience. In these works, Genzken layers various industrially produced materials and commodities to which she adds a variety of photographs and imagery. Among those included in the show are two significant wall works from 2012 that are made up of wallpaper, mirrors, picture frames, and other common materials from modern domestic interiors. In one of these wall works, Genzken includes photographic reproductions of famous old master portrait paintings, including Albrecht Dürer’s “Self-Portrait” (1498), which are placed on top of long pieces of wallpaper and wrapping paper that extend all the way to the floor. In the other work, Genzken has placed an image of Joseph Beuys, who was a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf where she studied. Genzken’s most recent wall-mounted panels are also included in the show. These works, done on aluminum panels, vary greatly in the density of their material embellishment. Some feature smears and pools of acrylic lacquer that rest loosely at times on the surface of the panel, while others are densely covered in photographs (many taken by Genzken herself), ephemera, and swatches of tape, foil, and fabric. Visually, Genzken’s wall works reference the material surfaces of the modern world, highlighting how mass media and postwar consumption have increasingly dissolved the lines between the private and the public, and the sacred and the profane.

Photo: Isa Genzken, Untitled, 2015, Mirror foil, glass, plastic flower, cigarette, tin foil, spray paint, plaster, acrylic, woven polypropylene, medication instructions, colored tape, photographs, plastic bag, metal clips, magazine covers, newspaper, aluminum, paper, and MDF in seven (7) parts, Overall dimensions variable, © Isa Genzken, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 5-6/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road Central, Hong Kong, Duration: 20/10-20/11/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.davidzwirner.com