Isa Genzken: VACATION

The show title revisits Isa Genzken’s solo exhibition, Urlaub, which took place at the Frankfurter Kunstverein in 2000. The term translates from German to English as “vacation” or “holiday,” and for the exhibition at David Zwirner, delves into Genzken’s proclamation that “the entire art system urgently needs a vacation,” offering a respite and moment of reflection. The installation of VACATION embraces this time of interlude as well as the artist’s long-standing engagement with architecture and the materials of the built environment.

Genzken’s work examines how travel can be intertwined with comfort and extravagance, bridging our everyday reality with fantasy. Yachturlaub (Yacht Holiday), photographed in 1993, is at the center of the exhibition and comprises thirty-six prints documenting the interior of German publisher and art collector Frieder Burda’s yacht. Presenting a temporally bound notion of elsewhere embodied by luxurious modes of travel and far-flung vacation locales, Yachturlaub, like many of Genzken’s photographs, provides a glimpse into the socioeconomic contexts in which art, architecture, and design—as well as artist and collector—operate.

Flugzeugfenster (2015), which translates to “airplane window,” is composed of a segment of an actual airplane—a recurring theme in Genzken’s work since the 1990s. Suspended from the wall by metal rods, the sculptural composition follows the curvilinear shape of the fuselage, with two oval windows; photographs and found imagery are adhered to the panels, including a reproduction of Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with the Red Hat (c. 1665–66; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) and a nude photograph of the artist.

Another work on view, Untitled (2016), also features collage elements including self-portraits of the artist with a lover and a promotional advertisement for the 1996 film Marvin’s Room, starring Meryl Streep and Leonardo DiCaprio. Here, Genzken positions herself within the production of a work of art—the artist never quite at rest.

In the sculptures on view, such as Kapelle and Waabe (both 1989), Genzken references raw architecture and building fragments in a lineage of work executed in concrete that she began in the mid-1980s. The works are reminiscent of churches, ruins, or bombed-out buildings that recall specific events in German history like the destruction of the Second World War and the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, in addition to broader notions of collapse and the emblematic weight of the industrial materials of everyday life.

The concrete sculptures are complemented by Genzken’s Basic Research paintings, created between 1988 and 1992, which are in close dialogue with her contemporaneous sculptural investigations, particularly the inversion of exterior and interior forms found in her concrete works, and materialize their lustrous surfaces. To make these works, Genzken placed an unstretched canvas face down on the studio floor, applying oil paint and scraping it away with a squeegee, to create an inverted image of the floor and its detritus.

Genzken first presented a multiband radio receiver as a readymade sculpture in 1982 titled Weltempfänger, the German term for shortwave radios. She began her series of rough concrete sculptures with non-functional embedded antennae later in the 1980s and continued to revisit the form in her work. The Weltempfänger works simultaneously point toward and confound notions of receptivity, communication, and openness—concepts Genzken has explored throughout her career. Likewise, these “world receivers,” as they are known in English, nod to the artist’s acute sensitivity to our collective conditions and the undercurrent of urgency that has been perpetually relevant to her work.

Also included in VACATION are collaborations that highlight Genzken’s long-standing interest in friendship, compassion, and play. Atelier (Studio) (1993), a photographic suite made with Wolfgang Tillmans, captures Genzken in the Cologne Cathedral. The images date from the first years of her enduring friendship with Tillmans, while picturing a prominent site of architectural and sculptural inspiration for the artist as a kind of “studio.”

Die Kleine Bushaltestelle (Gerüstbau) (Little Bus Stop [Scaffolding], 2012 is a rarely shown video work by Genzken featuring the German artist Kai Althoff. In the film, Genzken and Althoff perform short skits in drag that uproariously parody the anxious sociopolitical relations of the art world and satirize popular culture more broadly.