Installation view, Isa Genzken: Paris New York, David Zwirner, Paris, 2020
David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of recent work by the German artist Isa Genzken, on view at the gallery’s Paris location. This will be the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with David Zwirner and her first solo show in Paris since 2010. The exhibition coincides with a major presentation of Genzken’s early work at the Kunstmuseum Basel.
With a career spanning more than four decades, 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 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.
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“Artists should not look to the left or the right. Art should be strong and nonconformist—and most importantly, art should always be personal.”
Isa Genzken's work draws upon everyday material culture, including design, consumer goods, the media, architecture, and urban environments. Widely recognized for her pioneering contribution to sculpture, her oeuvre also includes paintings, collages, drawings, films, and photographs, and frequently incorporates seemingly disparate materials and imagery to create complex, enigmatic works.
When Genzken received the 2019 Nasher Prize, awarded annually by the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas to artists making an “extraordinary impact” on the understanding of sculptural form, the artist and Nasher Prize juror Phyllia Barlow said: “Genzken makes work that retains its spontaneity right to the last. She uses an extraordinarily diverse range of materials and forms, so there is a continuous unpredictability as to what the next body of work might and can be. The work is always evolving and therefore her influence is exceptional on artists of all ages.”
Installation view, Isa Genzken: Paris New York, David Zwirner, Paris, 2020
“What I think is important when we talk about Isa Genzken’s influence on younger generations of artists is that we shouldn’t just look for stylistic resemblance, but that it’s about a certain method and a certain attitude toward dealing with materiality and process.”
—Jörg Heiser
Installation view, Isa Genzken: Paris New York, David Zwirner, Paris, 2020
“Her humor and her attitude [inspire me]. Her freedom of materials that gives her work its sculptural form and disorder, this combination that seemingly questions ideals of good taste and beauty. Seeing Isa’s work gives me a feeling of endless possibilities and permission not to worry about aesthetics. It gives me the power to be radical in my own practice and trust my intuition.”
—Lara Schnitger, artist
Genzken’s “tower’’ sculptures reflect her decades-long fascination with architecture and urban skylines. At once makeshift and monumental, these architectonic forms consist of fiberboard adorned with mirror foil, spray paint, and other media. Engaging the architectural and sculptural histories of modernism, the towers are physically imposing, yet their materials and open form allude to the vulnerability of the modern built environment.
The artist’s panel works incorporate commercially available materials and a range of found and traditional media, such as images of corporate towers, disposable packaging, personal photographs, and acrylic paint. As the curator Laura Hoptman has noted, Genzken’s collages “are carefully planned to give the maximum transformative effect.”
Installation view, Isa Genzken: Paris New York, David Zwirner, Paris, 2020
“If you walk around my works and pay attention to the scenery, something different always emerges and you can always discover something new and sympathize with it.… I didn’t want these modernistic, flung-down objects that strive to avoid all content.”
Installation view, Isa Genzken: Paris New York, David Zwirner, Paris, 2020
“Isa’s work is a critique and celebration of aesthetic codes simultaneously.… I see the loss and destruction of the Bauhaus reflected in Isa’s work alongside a mockery of postwar attempts to codify form and create rules. So in this way I think she is socially aware in an aesthetic sense, open to the production of viable passages away from orthodoxy.”
—Liam Gillick, artist
“The intention is to get a different reaction from the ‘already known.’ I can’t explain it any other way.”
—Isa Genzken, in conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans
“I always felt that Isa … exposed herself to all the noise and then kind of found a signal.… [Her work is] reflecting on the materiality of the contemporary through image, through dialogue, through performing network and through thinking about what the materiality of something can be one step removed. I think that was a sensibility that a lot of us looked to.”
—Simon Denny, artist
Isa Genzken in her studio, Düsseldorf, 1982. Photo by Andreas Schön
Isa Genzken, Gelbes Ellipsoid, 1976
Isa Genzken, Die Form entwickelt sich daraus, dass jede der fünf Farben jede andere Farbe berührt (Auswahl), 1973
Opening on September 5 at Kunstmuseum Basel, Isa Genzken: Works from 1973 to 1983 is a major show of works from the first decade of the artist’s career. Leading up to the first presentations of her work at the Venice Biennale and documenta in 1982, this period saw the creation of important series, including the “Ellipsoids” and “Hyperbolos.”
“I love the sense of total freedom that characterizes Isa’s practice. The way everyday banalities turn deviant in her world is really inspiring to me.’’
—Anna Uddenberg, artist
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