Rebecca Horn
The Painting Machine / Aria in Black, 1991

Artist
Rebecca Horn

Title
The Painting Machine / Aria in Black

Year of creation
1991

Technology and dimensions
Two glass funnels, black ink, champagne, metal construction, motor

Year of acquisition
2004

With The Painting Machine / Aria in Black, an extraordinarily characteristic work by the artist Rebecca Horn, who has lived in Berlin for 30 years, comes into the collection of the Nationalgalerie. Created in 1991, it is one of the “desiring machines” whose theme is the constantly re-forming but ultimately unfulfilled sexual desire. The lovers appear here as a figure with female and male connotations through the glass funnels and the metal lever. The living physicality of the early works is transformed into a cerebral construction kept in motion by a motor. The mechanically moved limb, which, like the glass funnels, is attached to medical prostheses or Reminiscent of laboratory utensils from the 19th century, he paints abstract figurations on the wall with the two liquids, psychograms of the ever-present libido. If the fading red is associated in our imagination with bodily fluids such as blood, the black ink, in addition to its alchemical meaning as the dark bile juice of melancholics, clearly refers to the function of the artist. So “The Painting Machine / Aria in Black” is not just a pair of lovers merged into one figure but, above all, also a portrait of an artist.