Isa Genzken.
Duration July 13, 2023 - November 27, 2023
Location New National Gallery
The Neue Nationalgalerie is honoring Isa Genzken on the occasion of her 75th birthday with the exhibition “Isa Genzken. 75/75” and shows 75 sculptures from all of the German artist’s creative phases from the 1970s to the present day. Major works on display include the 10 meter long “Grey-black Hyperbolo 'MBB'” (1981), “Atelier” (1990), “Venice” (1993), “Nefertiti – The Original” (2012) and “Actors (2013).
The presentation in the upper hall of the Neue Nationalgalerie is reminiscent of exhibitions in classical collections of antiquities in its arrangement of individual sculptures. The constellation creates models, archetypes and measurements of people and modern society.
The sculptures are not carved from one material, but rather, in their heterogeneous materiality, embody the technologies, plastic, concrete, decor and functional objects that permeate today's everyday life. Genzken (born 1948) takes these new measurements and changing framings into the true, the beautiful, the absurd and the exaggerated. Her work is based on actualities, such as a window or an actor's figure, which she changes and distorts into her own realities and formal language. The individual and she as an artist, her own biography, are tools for this questioning of the ideals of Western society and its production types.
“The works are intended to function more as moving images than as sculptures; you see a new image from every angle. Nothing is rigid or two-dimensional, but cinematic,” says Isa Genzken in an interview in 2016. The visitors find themselves being questioned through the confrontation of familiar everyday life. Collages of living environments are created. Not least through reflections in the surfaces of the objects, the viewers in the exhibition space themselves become actors, tools, and standards.
On Monday, November 27, 2023, the museum will be open for a special opening on the occasion of the artist's birthday.
Curated by Klaus Biesenbach, director of the Neue Nationalgalerie and Lisa Botti curatorial assistant. A catalog accompanies the exhibition.
The exhibition is made possible by the Friends of the National Gallery.
A special exhibition at the Nationalgalerie – Berlin State Museums.
More information about the exhibition
Image credits: Isa Genzken, blue-gray-yellow hyperbolo 'Elbe', 1981Wood, varnish/wood, lacquer20 x 20 x 544 cmPrivate collection BerlinCourtesy Galerie Buchholz/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023 | Isa GenzkenUntitled, 2018mannequin, clothes, bicycle and spray paint121 x 170 x 60 cmMonika Schnetkamp CollectionCourtesy Galerie Buchholz© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023