About Isa Genzken Painting"s
The column for Isa Genzken is a recurring motif: its linear purity becomes a critical field on which she explores the relations between art, architecture, design, and social experience. In her most recent work, Genzken augments her usually svelte and sophisticated formalism to create assemblages of maximum overload. Bouquet explodes as unwieldy still-life: its plinth base defiled with spray paint, adorned with garlands, topped with a menagerie of cowboys and Indians warring under an ornamental flower arrangement. Posed as a beautiful and grotesque requiem, Genzken's sculpture references a shattered utopia, framing modernist architectural form as monument of hope and mourning.Leaning against the wall as a series of towers or screens,
Isa Genzken's installation becomes simultaneously painterly and architectural: her giant mirror plates like translucent building facades, encapsulating reflections of the gallery interior within their chaotic framework. Highlighting this illusion between flat and perceived space, Genzken collages her glass planes with pages torn from books, bands of tape, and dripping paint, creating a sense of weightlessness in their layered materiality. Repetitive grids, greasy lines, and candy coloured bars, become entangled as urban decay, devouring antiquarian images in its graffiti-like debasement. Titled Kinder Filmen 1, Genzken's installation suggests information overload broadcast as disrupted transmission, her formalist excess presenting a break down of innocence.
During this period, her work groups, which are wide-ranging and surprising in terms of both form and the media used, have involved her public in a constantly fresh examination of the meanings and function-modes of artistic propositions. Here Isa Genzken focuses on the medium of sculpture. This has not been such a presence in art in recent years, but a younger generation of artists is once more making it central to its creative activities. Genzken's work, both historically and actually, is impressive in this context, not just because of its consistent development, which is inherent in the work, but also in the precise analysis, critical of both the age and of art, that she regularly and effortlessly leaves behind her.
Isa Genzken's installation becomes simultaneously painterly and architectural: her giant mirror plates like translucent building facades, encapsulating reflections of the gallery interior within their chaotic framework. Highlighting this illusion between flat and perceived space, Genzken collages her glass planes with pages torn from books, bands of tape, and dripping paint, creating a sense of weightlessness in their layered materiality. Repetitive grids, greasy lines, and candy coloured bars, become entangled as urban decay, devouring antiquarian images in its graffiti-like debasement. Titled Kinder Filmen 1, Genzken's installation suggests information overload broadcast as disrupted transmission, her formalist excess presenting a break down of innocence.
During this period, her work groups, which are wide-ranging and surprising in terms of both form and the media used, have involved her public in a constantly fresh examination of the meanings and function-modes of artistic propositions. Here Isa Genzken focuses on the medium of sculpture. This has not been such a presence in art in recent years, but a younger generation of artists is once more making it central to its creative activities. Genzken's work, both historically and actually, is impressive in this context, not just because of its consistent development, which is inherent in the work, but also in the precise analysis, critical of both the age and of art, that she regularly and effortlessly leaves behind her.