Breitwieser

Hoptman
Darling
Grove
Lee

Born in postwar Germany in 1948, Isa Genzken studied at the Dsseldorf Academy
of Fine Arts before embarking on a career that would ultimately encompass deep
explorations of an extraordinary range of mediums, including sculpture, film, drawing,
painting, photography, and assemblage. For some forty years now, Genzken has engaged
with both the most salient aesthetic concerns of the time as well as broader questions
related to our experience of the exuberant and disorienting flux that defines contemporary
culture. The modern urban environment, the nature of space and time, our relationship
to the architecture that surrounds us, as well as the ramifications of seminal events such
as the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the aftermath of September 11all are examined
with virtuosity, humanity, and incisive wit in Genzkens diverse production. Published
in tandem with the artists first major career survey in the United States, Isa Genzken:
Retrospective marks the most comprehensive chronicle to date of the work of one
of the most ambitious and influential artists of the past half century.

genzken

Isa Genzken: Retrospective

isa genzken
Retrospective

isa genzken
Retrospective

Sabine Breitwieser, Laura Hoptman,

Michael Darling, and Jeffrey Grove
with an essay by Lisa Lee

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

in collaboration with

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Dallas Museum of Art

Cline has established a forward-thinking, rigorous design

philosophy for strong, independent, modern women. Our
collections freely express the ideas, emotions, and aesthetic
influences that inform an evolving design vision. We embrace
intellectual curiosity, honesty, and risk, and value thoughtful
and provocative artistic expression.
It is an honor for us to support the work of Isa Genzken during
this landmark retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New
York. We have a great appreciation for the artists uncompromising
integrity, complexity and independence of thought, and respect
for her fearless exploration of ideas, materials, and aesthetics.

CONTENTS

Directors Foreword

Acknowledgments

14

The Characters of Isa Genzken:

Between the Personal and
the Constructive, 19701996
Sabine Breitwieser

302

Chronology
Stephanie Weber

319

Selected Exhibition History

compiled by Stephanie Weber

Isa Genzken: The Art of Assemblage,

19932013
Laura Hoptman

324

Selected Bibliography
compiled by Stephanie Weber

328

Exhibition Checklist

170

Plates, 19952013

332

Lenders to the Exhibition

254

Isa Genzken, Model Citizen

Lisa Lee

334

Trustees of The Museum of Modern Art

274

Isa Genzken: Himmel und Erde

(Heaven and Earth)
Michael Darling

286

Isa Genzkens Homage to Herself

Jeffrey Grove

44
130

Cline, part of the LVMH group, is a fashion house based in Paris.

Under the creative direction of Phoebe Philo, Cline has
established a forward-thinking, rigorous design philosophy for
strong, independent, modern women. Clines collections freely
express the ideas, emotions, and aesthetic influences that
inform an evolving design vision. We embrace intellectual
curiosity, honesty, and risk, and value thoughtful and provocative
artistic expression.

It is an honor for us to support the work of Isa Genzken during

this landmark retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New
York. We have a great appreciation for the artists uncompromising
integrity, complexity and independence of thought, and respect
for her fearless exploration of ideas, materials, and aesthetics.

Plates, 19741994

Directors Foreword

Isa Genzken is one of the most important

and influential artists of the past thirty years,
yet she has never had a major retrospective
exhibition in an American art museum. This
lacuna in the exhibition history of the United
States has created the opportunity for
The Museum of Modern Art, the Museum
of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Dallas
Museum of Art to combine resources to
produce Isa Genzken: Retrospective, a comprehensive look at Genzkens work in all
mediums, from her early innovative experiments through her extraordinary recent
installations. A majority of the works in this
exhibition will be on view in the United States
for the first time; others have never been
exhibited institutionally anywhere.
Genzkens work is epically diverse, but it has
been inspired by two grand themes: modernity
and urban architecture. It has also unfolded
in chapters, beginning in the late 1970s and
continuing without cease until today, when
a new generation of artists, curators, and art
lovers has been inspired by the artists radical
inventiveness. Ranging from large-scale
sculptures that limn Constructivist and
Minimalist aesthetics to rougher, more overtly
architectural concrete works that conjure
ruins to paintings, photographs, and, finally,
to found-object and collage installations that
have redefined assemblage for a new era,
Genzkens body of work represents both a rare
artistic freedom as well as a disciplined, almost
obsessive sensitivity toward the relationship
of individuals to their sculptural surroundings.

Genzken entered the art world in Dsseldorf

in the early 1970s, a place and time when the
artistic discourse was dominated by German
and American titans. Joseph Beuys, Gerhard
Richter, Carl Andre, Dan Graham, and
Lawrence Weiner were all part of Genzkens
artistic circle, and it is a testament to her
toughness and her talent that she was able
to forge an artistic language and point of view
that relates to Minimalism, Post-Minimalism,
and German Conceptual art but is profoundly
distinct from them as well. One of the elements of Genzkens sculptures that held them
apart from the Minimal and Post-Minimal
mainstream in the late 1970s and early 1980s
was their narrativity, observable throughout
her career but increasingly central to her
practice since 2000. In the new millennium,
Genzkens ever more complex assemblages
have fearlessly taken on issues particular to
our global moment, from the impact of the
pervasiveness of cheap, manufactured objects
on our visual culture to the climate of fear
created in the aftermath of September 11.
Genzken was in Manhattan that day, and it is
the sense of deep unease caused by that
tragic scenario with its horrific conflation of
architecture and spectacular destruction that
weaves in and out of most of her work of the
past decade. Beginning with the sculptural
series Empire/Vampire, Who Kills Death and
culminating in the 2008 installation Ground
Zero, these recent works tell the story of
urban apocalypse and renewal with an incisive
and criticalbut also empatheticeye.

Genzken is an artist not only of our time but

also of our place. The urban environment
has been a constant inspiration, but it is the
modern American city that has proven to be
her most ardent muse, from the skyscrapers
of Chicago to the storefronts of Manhattan.
If her work is less well-known to American
audiences, this exhibition, which highlights
the artists achievements in all their mastery
and variety, their contemporaneity and their
drama, seeks to change that.
We are grateful to the curators of the show
Sabine Breitwieser, Michael Darling, Jeffrey
Grove, and Laura Hoptmanfor embarking on
a three-year collaboration that has produced
an exhibition and a book of a quality befitting
their subject. At The Museum of Modern Art,
the show is made possible by Cline, with
major support provided by Jerry I. Speyer
and Katherine G. Farley, The Andy Warhol
Foundation for the Visual Arts, and Lonti Ebers.
We are deeply grateful to all of them for their
generosity. At the time of this publication, the
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presentation was made possible with lead support
from Kenneth and Anne Griffin, Howard and
Donna Stone, and Helen and Sam Zell; major
support by Andrea and Jim Gordon and Margot
and George Greig; and additional funding
provided by the Jacques and Natasha Gelman
Trust; Hauser & Wirth; David Zwirner, New
York; the Goethe-Institut and the Foreign
Office of the Federal Republic of Germany;
neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Galerie Buchholz,
Cologne/Berlin; and Mary Ittelson. Air transportation was provided by American Airlines,

the Official Airline of MCA Chicago. In Dallas,

the exhibition is made possible by the
Contemporary Art Initiative, a generous group
of patrons who provide contributions to
strengthen contemporary art programs at the
Dallas Museum of Art, including Arlene and
John Dayton, Claire Dewar, Jennifer and John
Eagle, Amy and Vernon Faulconer, Kenny Goss,
Tim Hanley, Julie and Ed Hawes, Marguerite
Steed Hoffman, The Karpidas Foundation,
Cynthia and Forrest Miller, Janelle and Alden
Pinnell, Allen and Kelli Questrom, Cindy and
Howard Rachofsky, Catherine and Will Rose,
Deedie and Rusty Rose, Gayle and Paul Stoffel,
and Sharon and Michael Young, and TWO TWO
for AIDS and Art, an annual benefit that supports the Dallas Museum of Art and amfAR,
The Foundation for AIDS Research, with air
transportation provided by American Airlines.
We are grateful to all these supporters, and we
owe our sincere thanks as well to the lenders
to the exhibition, private and institutional.
Finally, we extend our deep gratitude to Isa
Genzken herself, for allowing our museums to
share her lifes work with an audience who
is sure to be astonished by it.
Maxwell L. Anderson
Eugene McDermott Director
Dallas Museum of Art

Madeleine Grynsztejn

Pritzker Director
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Glenn D. Lowry

Director
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Isa Genzken in her studio

in Dsseldorf, 1982

12

13

Sabine Breitwieser

The Characters
of Isa Genzken: Between
the Personal and the
Constructive, 19701996

This essay proposes to survey roughly the first twenty-five years

of Isa Genzkens career in its seemingly contradictory swings between
the personal and the structural, beginning with its autobiographical
implications and arguing from the focus on the body. Genzkens rejection
of medium-specificity, especially in regard to her broad conception
of film, her equally extended notion of portraiture, and the significance
of architecture as a consistent underlying concern are all key in this
account of her work. Looking first at Genzkens performance and other
early works, this immediately becomes evident as we encounter film
articulated through drawings, texts, and sculptural ensembles. Moreover,
in Genzkens early stereometric sculptures, the body of the viewer
comes into play; Genzken mobilizes the gaze of the viewer, who needs
to occupy and actively experience the sculptures in terms of the surrounding space. In all of this, Genzken does not exclude her own body;
indeed, she has explored the genre of self-portraiture in a variety of
unexpected forms, ranging from imprints of her studio floor to ingenious
photographic techniques to representational surrogates in the form
of physical objects. A reliance on objects drawn from the vocabulary
of everyday life proves to be a central theme, one that she has continued
to explore to the present day. Uniting all is a dynamic, expansive vision
of the spatiotemporal properties of filmincorporating drawing,
photography, and sculptureas well as films potential as an effective
and all-inclusive public medium.

Do you not see that all is fiction...?

[Y]ou shall never play me a trick without my playing you one in return.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing,
Minna von Barnhelm1
The new temples are already cracked
future ruins,
one day grass will also grow over the city
over its final layer.
Einstrzende Neubauten,
Die Befindlichkeit des Landes (The State of the Country)2

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Minna

von Barnhelm, Edward Brooks, Jr.,
trans. (Philadelphia: David McKay,
1899 [1767]), Act V, Scene XII. First
performed in Hamburg in 1767,
Minna von Barnhelm is the bestknown comedy from the German
Enlightenment and one of the
most important in all of German
literature. In his theoretical and
critical writings, Lessing (17291781)
encouraged the development
of a new, independent bourgeois
theater in Germany. In his oftquoted Laocon, or On the
Boundaries of Painting and Poetry
(1766), he argued for what would
later be termed mediumspecificity.
2 Einstrzende Neubauten, Die
Befindlichkeit des Landes (The
State of the Country), from
the album Silence Is Sexy (2000).

14

One of the most important artists of our time, Isa Genzken has developed
an unconventional body of work in the postwar German context that
has functioned in critical dialogue with both European and American
art. Specifically in her early work, she responded to Russian and Soviet
Constructivism and American Abstract Expressionism, and sought to
develop a European answer to Minimalism that had international relevance.
Genzkens oeuvre is distinguished by a constant inventiveness, a highly
idiosyncratic artistic approach, and an unmistakable idiom within each
of her diverse groups of work. Although she has veered off in new,
unexpected directions at regular intervals, reviewing her work over the
course of four decades reveals a surprising coherence, one rooted in
the logic of her successive artistic choices as well as in the way in which
her series, in all their remarkable heterogeneity, relate to one another.
Individual works, or groups of work, appear as protagonists in an openended play, one in which personal, autobiographical, and fictional
elements enter into a dialectic with techno-scientific principles and
structural concerns in ways previously considered incompatible.

I. Formation as an Artist in Postwar Germany

3 Isa Genzken, Skizzen fr einen

Spielfilm, in Isa Genzken (Bremen,
Germany: Kunsthalle Bremen,
1993).

15

In Skizzen fr einen Spielfilm (Sketches for a Feature Film), which first

appeared in the catalogue for her 1993 exhibition at Kunsthalle Bremen
(fig. 1), Genzken published twenty stories from her life that are at once
mundane and unsettling, beginning with her birth and ending with an
exhibition opening.3 From the start, her autobiography is clearly embellished with fictional elements and touches of parody, for her description
of life in the late 1940s in her birthplace of Bad Oldesloe in northern
Germany unmistakably borrows from the atmosphere of Carl Spitzwegs
painting Der arme Poet (The Poor Poet) (1839). Recalling Spitzwegs
depiction of an artists impoverished life and working conditions, Genzken
draws an image of herself as a baby swaddled in a laundry basket with
an umbrella attached to protect her from the rain dripping through
the attic roof. While the artist was still a small child, her parents moved
to Hamburg, thirty miles away, into a middle-class apartment house
on Sophienterrasse next to the Aussenalster. At that imposing address,

where everyone was rich except for us, the family occupied a oneroom apartment with a single floor-to-ceiling window facing the garden
out back.4 The Germany of Genzkens childhood in the 1950s was still
reeling in the aftermath of the war, and her parents seem to have
tried to compensate for such confined living conditions with creativity.
Near the front door, her mother marked off a childrens room with
a construction of cords.
Genzken has recalled her early personal and artistic development in the
three works Family, Sophienterrasse, and Mittelweg (all 1991). These
sculptures, reminiscent of window frames, are comprised of poured
concrete and epoxy elements of different sizes, hinged together in pairs,
representing the first architectural forms that impressed her. Two similar
sculptures from this period, simply titled Paravent (Screens), have no
personal references and only an indication of a possible function. In this
group of works, Genzken presents hybrid objects that oscillate between
autonomous sculptures and flexible interior architecture. With them,
she seeks to objectify her formative years: her earliest social unit (Family;
fig. 2), the first address she knew (Sophienterrasse), and her first route
to school (Mittelweg). The oscillation of these forms between autonomy
and usefulness reflects at once Genzkens particular formal concerns
while simultaneously addressing the narrowness of our vision, questioning
the meaning of the past and the accuracy of recollection. While two
of the sculptures are cast wholly in concrete, the third and largest one
is unique for the manner in which its material alone seems to exemplify
the unfolding problematics of memory and history in postwar Germany.
In the largest element of the three-part sculpture Family, only a portion
of one of the wings is concrete, whereas the two smaller windows
are cast wholly in epoxy. The transparent epoxy, extremely toxic in the
casting and hardening stages, looks like it is coated in certain areas
by a more massive layer of concrete, as though with a second skin. No
other material evokes German reconstruction after 1945 like concrete.
Indeed, one could draw the conclusion that here, mummified with
epoxy, it represents an archaeology, often experienced as unpleasant,
of collective and individual responsibility for the horrific events of
the 1930s and 1940s.

4 Isa Genzken, in conversation with

the author, October 89, 2012.
Unless otherwise noted, quotes
from Genzken that follow all come
from this conversation.

Fig. 1

As Germany sought to rebuild after the war and began to grapple with
the enormity of its crimes against humanity, it embarked on a building
program of ethical architecture, yet at the same time the postwar
devastation was also seen as an opportunity to implement urban planning
measures that seamlessly meshed with those already conceived by the

Fig. 2

Fig. 1 Cover of the catalogue for Genzkens 1993 exhibition

at Kunsthalle Bremen
Fig. 2 Isa Genzken. Family. 1991. Epoxy resin, metal,
and concrete, three parts, overall: 85/2314/"
(2186038 cm). Installation view of Isa Genzken:
Everybody Needs At Least One Window, Renaissance Society
at the University of Chicago, May 14June 28, 1992

Breitwieser

16

17

44

Plate 1. Untitled, 1974

Lacquered wood, two parts
Part one: 981/" (250.541 cm)
Part two: 81//" (20622 cm)
Thomas Borgmann, Berlin

45

Plate 2. Gelbes Ellipsoid (Yellow Ellipsoid), 1976

Lacquered wood
3/3/191/" (99486 cm)
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin

46

Plate 3. Schwarzes Hyperbolo Nsschen

(Black Hyperbolo Little Nuts), 1980

Lacquered wood
5/9/219" (14.525558.5 cm)
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin

47

Top
Plate 17. Installation view of Ohren (Ears)
(1980) in Isa Genzken, Galerie Konrad Fischer,
Platanenstrasse 7, Dsseldorf, May 30
June 20, 1981
Bottom
Plate 18. Installation view of (fore) Staffelei
(Easel) (1983) and (wall) two Ohren (Ears)
(1980) in JuxtaPosition: skulptur=sculpture,
Charlottenborg Exhibition Hall, Copenhagen,
April 29June 6, 1993
Facing
Plate 19. Ohr, 2002
Digital print on high-performance foil
228153/" (580390 cm)
Installation view at City Hall,
Innsbruck, Austria

64

65

Facing
Plate 21. Mein Gehirn (My Brain), 1984
Synthetic polymer paint on plaster, metal
9/77/" (242018 cm)
Collection Daniel Buchholz
and Christopher Mller, Cologne
68

69

Left
Plate 22. Mllberg

(Pile of Rubbish), 1984

Plaster, metal, burlap, and paper

16/16/18" (424247 cm)
Private collection, Turin

Right
Plate 23. Birne (Pear), 1984
Synthetic polymer paint on plaster,
lightbulb
11/78/" (302022 cm)
Generali Foundation Collection, Vienna

Plate 28. Weltempfnger (World Receiver), 198789

Concrete, steel, and metal radio antennas
Overall: 8410215" (21526040 cm)
Private collection

76

77

80

81

Facing
Plate 30. Rosa Zimmer (Pink Room), 1987
Spray paint on concrete, steel
761822/" (1944657 cm)
Generali Foundation Collection, Vienna

Above
Plate 31. Kleiner Pavilion

(Small Pavilion), 1989

Concrete, tiles, and steel

701618" (177.840.645.7 cm)
Courtesy David Zwirner, New York

114

115

Plate 56. Installation view of MetLife.

Isa Genzken, EA-Generali Foundation,
Vienna, September 21December 22, 1996

Laura Hoptman

Isa Genzken: The Art

of Assemblage, 19932013
Introduction: Realism, Narrative, Urban Life
Most writers on Isa Genzkens work have concentrated on the thematic
continuities in an oeuvre that, over forty years, is notable for its formal
variety. To acknowledge the connections between visually disparate
sculptures like her series of Hyperbolos, begun in 1976, and more recent
sculptural ensembles such as Ground Zero, done thirty years later, does
not mask the fact that at the beginning of the 1990s, concurrent with
a number of significant shifts in the artists lifeincluding a final separation from her husband, Gerhard Richter, her introduction to a younger
group of artists and gallerists, and a move from Cologne to Berlin
Genzken radically changed her artistic strategy, moving away from the
constructed object towards the assembled one. Genzkens full-blown
collage aesthetic as expressed in three dimensions would not make an
appearance until around 1999, but in the several years preceding, her
researches and experiences built towards what has become a twentyyear investigation into assemblage. With this found-object-based
language, Genzken has expanded and explored a complex and very
contemporary notion of realism that, in fact, began its formation early
on in her career.
The advent of assemblage in Genzkens practice coincided with a heightened interest in her work internationally, specifically by a generation
of artists, gallerists, and curators significantly younger than she who
presented her work in the context of a cultural renaissance in postunification Germany, centered in Berlin. The artists move from Cologne
to Berlin in 1996 seemed to serve as a definitive break from the intellectual context of an earlier generation of German art that had previously
informed much of her work, particularly the work of Richter and the
legacies of American Minimalism and Conceptualism. Genzken remarked
that the change in her work in the 1990s was the result of finally becoming herself. Im no longer interested in the art of others, she said to
Nicolaus Schafhausen in an interview in 2007, I simply want to do my
own thing.1 And do her own thing she did. Genzken retained her keen

Facing. Wolfgang Tillmans. Isa vor Sound Factory, 1995

(Isa in front of Sound Factory, 1995)

Hoptman

130

131

appreciation for architectural form, for narrative subject matter, and

for sculpture that has a social dimension, but she forged an entirely new
sculptural language in the 1990s that has not only influenced a generation of younger artists but has also helped to define a period in the
visual culture of Germany as well as in contemporary art internationally.

Nicolaus Schafhausen, At some

point, youve got to say to yourself,
its okay now, youve tried everything. A Conversation between
Isa Genzken and Nicolaus
Schafhausen, in Schafhausen,
ed., Isa Genzken: Oil: German
Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2007
(Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag,
2007), 155.
2 See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,
The Fragment as Model, in Isa
Genzken: Everybody Needs At
Least One Window (Chicago:
Renaissance Society, 1992),
13541; and Diedrich Diederichsen,
Interview with Isa Genzken,
in Alex Farquharson, et al., Isa
Genzken (London: Phaidon Press,
2006), 829.
3 Isa Genzken, quoted in Ulrich
Wilmes, Isa Genzken: Projekt
ABC, in Klaus Bussmann and
Kasper Knig, eds., Skulptur
Projekte Mnster, 1987 (Cologne:
DuMont Buchverlag, 1987), 94.
4 Genzken, quoted in Wolfgang
Tillmans, Isa Genzken:
A Conversation with Wolfgang
Tillmans, Camera Austria 81
(2003): 8.

Hoptman

132

set a goal for her work to be not only brilliantly designed but also
the most current, the most relevant, the most modern. The search for
a connection to the moment inspired her to reevaluate the legacy of
the readymade, a strategy which, in its purest form, she explored only
once, with Weltempfnger (World Receiver) (pl. 20), a work consisting
of a state-of-the-art world-band radio receiver placed at eye level
on a high, slim base. In an object like Weltempfnger and, subsequently,
in her full-blown assemblages, Genzken was less interested in matters
of recontextualization (the transformation of a manufactured quotidian
object into an art object through context) than the orchestration
of already-made elements of daily life into a larger narrative. Brilliantly
engineered and executed things in the world like the Weltempfnger,
a pane of precut colored glass, or a cast-plastic toy were not, in and
of themselves, interesting as sculpture, but Genzken realized, perhaps
through her analysis of the role of the photographic image, that they
could carry the weight of representation and of narrative in her sculpture.
I have always said that, with any sculpture you have to be able to say
although this is not a readymade, it could be one, Genzken stated in an
interview with the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans in 2003. Thats what
a sculpture has to look like. It must have a certain relation to reality.5

Genzken had long experimented with the dynamics of an artworks

relation to the viewer, but her shift to assemblage marked a radical leap.
In contrast to works ranging from her Hyperbolos and Ellipsoids to her
concrete constructions, assemblage posits an entirely different mode
of looking at an artwork in relationship to the world that surrounds it.
A number of critics have analyzed Genzkens production in the 1970s and
1980s in reference to the notion of social space, citing the elements
in all of Genzkens three-dimensional works that cause them to interact
with the viewer and the space that surrounds them.2 By the early 1990s
Genzkens desire for her work to interact with the world around it had
grown to the point where mere site-specificity or the manipulation
of formal spatial relationships between the object and the viewer did not
suffice. In 1987 Genzken was quoted as saying that public sculpture
operates between the two poles of a new housing development and
a traditional monument, which is to say, from a domicile to a public
object, from the secrets of the interior to the visibility of the popular.3
In the 1990s Genzken moved from the creation of an object in an
environment to the creation of environments themselves. In an effort
not to represent the world but to be part of itin other words, to be
modernGenzken chose as her raw materials the cheap, shiny, and
ubiquitous building blocks of the contemporary urban environment: from
toys to cardboard pizza boxes, from Mylar and caution tape to orange
construction netting. Working with these real-world materials, she
created installations that engaged with the everyday in substance as
well as in subject.
Genzkens respect for the object in the world was made apparent very
early in her career, when in 1979 she lushly rephotographed advertisements for high-end stereo equipment and then framed them (pls. 1115).
Looking back on her motivation for this series, Genzken saw in these
superbly engineered objects that she photographed so lovingly a model
for contemporary sculpture. When I was photographing hi-fi adverts
I thought to myself, everyone has one of these towers at home. Its the
latest thing, the most modern equipment available. So a sculpture
must be at least as modern and must stand up to it.... Thats how good
a modern sculpture has to be.4 From the beginning then, Genzken had

Genzken met Tillmans in 1993 at Galerie Daniel Buchholz in Cologne.

Buchholz, who opened his gallery in 1986, began to represent Genzken
two years later. He was fifteen years younger than Genzken, and his stable
of artists mainly reflected a new generation emerging from Cologne
in the 1990s, including Tillmans (who was based in London but traveled
often to Cologne) and, by 1995, the musician, painter, sculptor, performer,
and Cologne denizen Kai Althoff. Tillmans and Althoff became Genzkens
close friends and sometime collaborators. Tillmanss and Genzkens
respective work of the past fifteen years have an interesting reciprocal
relationship, and Genzkens ideas concerning the photograph as an object
akin to a sculpture seem to be relevant as well for the younger artists
installation work. In her interview with Tillmans, Genzken made an explicit
connection between photography and sculpture: Often my feeling
is that (artists) think something up that is supposed to be art. Thats not
what I want at all. Rather, a sculpture is really a photoalthough it can
be shifted, it just still always has an aspect that reality has, too.6
This conflation of the sculptural and the photographic on the basis
of a shared realism forms one of the pillars of Genzkens assemblage
aesthetic. The link between the two seemingly diverse mediums was made,
in Genzkens formation, through the idea that a photograph itself is

5 Ibid., 17.
6 Ibid.

133

170

171

Plate 65. I Love New York, Crazy City, 199596 (detail views)
Paper, gelatin silver and chromogenic color
prints, and tape, in three books
Each: 15122" (39327 cm)
Collection the artist

180

Plate 72. Installation view of portrait columns

in Isa Genzken. Sie sind mein Glck, Kunstverein
Braunschweig, Germany, June 11August 27, 2000

181

186

Plate 76. Fuck the Bauhaus #2, 2000

Plywood, plastic, paper, cardboard pizza box, plastic
flowers, stones, tape, model trees, and toy car
82/27/20/" (2107051 cm)
Collection Charles Asprey

187

Plate 77. Fuck the Bauhaus #4, 2000

Plywood, plexiglass, plastic Slinky, clipboards, aluminum light
shade, flower petals, tape, printed paper, shells, and model tree
88/30/24" (2247761 cm)
Private collection, Turin

Plate 91. Empire/Vampire III, 13, 2004

Spray paint on metal and glass, chromogenic
color prints, and plastic on wood pedestal
652318" (1676046 cm)
Collection neugerriemschneider, Berlin

202

203

Plate 92. Empire/Vampire X, 2003

Synthetic polymer paint on Styrofoam, plastic,
artificial flowers, and fabric on wood pedestal
862317/" (2196045 cm)

Plate 104. Kinder Filmen III, VI, VIII, XI, and XII
(Children Filming III, VI, VIII, XI, and XII), 2005

218

Spray paint on umbrellas and stands, wood crates, plastic chairs, dolls,
ceramic figurines, plastic safety nets, molded-plastic bubble mirror,
casters, utility cart with wheels, mirrors, books, pens, plastic hanging
board rack, rubber gloves, printed paper, paper bag, toy gun, fabric
hats and vests, tape, electric fan, and electrical components
Dimensions variable
Museum Ludwig, Cologne

219

Plate 108. Oil XI, 2007

Vinyl, plastic, and aluminum suitcases; silkscreen
on laminated fabric; jackets; stuffed animals; plastic;
paper; frames; and three fabric-and-plastic space
suits, twenty parts
Dimensions variable
Installation view at the German Pavilion, 52nd Venice
Biennial, Venice, June 10November 21, 2007

224

225

Above
Plates 113, 114. Hospital (Ground Zero), 2008
Synthetic polymer paint on fabric, metal dolly,
plastic flowers in spray-painted vase, ribbon, metal,
mirror foil, glass, fiberboard, and casters
122/24/29/" (3126376 cm)
Collection Charles Asprey

234

Facing
Plate 115. Memorial Tower (Ground Zero), 2008
Synthetic polymer paint and spray paint on mirror foil
and tape, plastic, filmstrips, printed paper, fiberboard,
and casters
124/31/35/" (31680.590 cm)
Collection Eric and Suzanne Syz, Switzerland

235

250

Plates 128, 129. Schauspieler (Actors), 2013 (detail views)

Mannequins, clothes, shoes, fabric, and paper
Dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin

251

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