Isa Genzken
David Zwirner | Hong Kong
Isa Genzken
20 October – 18 December 2021
5–6/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road Central, Hong Kong
David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of works by German artist Isa Genzken. On view at the gallery’s Hong Kong location, this will be the first solo presentation of Genzken’s work in Greater China.The show coincides with the ongoing presentation of the artist’s Rose II (2007) at K11 Musea, HongKong, and her solo exhibition Isa Genzken: Here and Now at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen,Düsseldorf, Germany.
With a career spanning more than four decades, Genzken has incessantly probed the shifting boundariesbetween art, design, architecture, technology, and the individual. Her prodigious oeuvre frequentlyincorporates seemingly disparate materials and imagery to create complex, enigmatic works that rangein media, including sculpture, painting, collage, drawing, film, and photography. Deeply attuned to boththe legacies of the twentieth-century avant-garde and the materials and forms of twenty-first-centuryglobal society, Genzken’s workviscerallyinterrogatesthe impact of our increasingly commodified andinterconnected culture on our everyday lives.
The exhibition will present key works from the past ten years of Genzken’s career.Among the selectionon view will be an installation of Genzken’s recent “tower” and “column” sculptures. These works stemfrom the artist’s decades-long fascination with architecture and urban skylines. At once makeshift and monumental, these architectonic forms consist of vertical structures of medium-density fiberboardadorned with mirror foil, spray paint, and other media, complicating the distinctions between surfaceand depth, and interior and exterior space. Engaging the architectural and sculptural histories ofmodernism, the towers and columns are physically imposing, yet the materials and their human scaleallude to the inherent vulnerability of the modern built environment.
In addition, several freestanding floor sculptures will be on view that belong to Genzken’sSchauspieler(Actors) series, which debuted as part of her criticallyacclaimed retrospective organized by The Museumof Modern Art, New York, in 2013. The series, consisting of elaborately outfitted mannequins holding anarray of props and accessories, signaled a notable shift in Genzken’s practice: with the mannequinfunctioning as the sculpture’s base, the artist employs a figurative idiom—making these works her mostexplicit engagement with the human form—in contrast to the abstract and geometric modes thatcharacterized her earlier sculptures.
The exhibition will also feature wall-mounted works that expand upon the artist’s fascination with the relationship between architecture, art, commercial goods, and everyday experience. In these works, Genzken layers various industrially produced materials and commodities to which she adds a variety of photographs and imagery. Among those included in the show are two significant wall works from 2012that are made up of wallpaper, mirrors, picture frames, and other common materials from moderndomestic interiors. In one of these wall works, Genzken includes photographic reproductions of famous old master portrait paintings, including Albrecht Dürer’sSelf-Portrait (1498; Museo del Prado, Madrid),which are placed on top of long pieces of wallpaper and wrapping paper that extend all the way to the floor. In the other work, Genzken has placed an image of the iconic German artist Joseph Beuys, who was a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf where she studied.
Genzken’s most recent wall-mounted panels will also be included in the show. These works, done onaluminum panels,vary greatly in the density of theirmaterial embellishment. Some feature smears andpools of acrylic lacquer that rest loosely at times on the surface of the panel, while others are denselycovered in photographs (many taken by Genzken herself), ephemera, and swatches of tape, foil, andfabric. Visually, Genzken’s wall works reference the material surfaces of the modern world, highlightinghow mass media and postwar consumption have increasingly dissolved the lines between the privateand the public, and the sacred and the profane.
Born in 1948 in Bad Oldesloe, Germany, Isa Genzken studied fine arts, art history, and philosophy inHamburg, Berlin, and Cologne, before completing her studies at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1977. Since 2004, her work has been represented by David Zwirner. In 2019, she was the recipient of theNasher Prize, awarded every April by the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.
Genzken’s work has been the subject of many major museum exhibitions, including traveling surveys organised by the Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn, Germany (1988; traveled to KunstmuseumWinterthur, Switzerland; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, both 1989); The RenaissanceSociety at The University of Chicago (1992; traveled to Portikus, Frankfurt; Palais des Beaux-Arts,Brussels; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, all 1993); Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany (2002; traveled to Kunsthalle Zürich, 2003); and Whitechapel Gallery, London (2009; traveledto Museum Ludwig, Cologne). Other venues that have hosted important solo exhibitions include the Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2000); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2002); Camden Arts Centre, London (2006); Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck (2006); Secession, Vienna (2006); and Museion, Bolzano,Italy (2010).
In 2013, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized Genzken’s first museum survey in the United States, Retrospective, making it the most comprehensive presentation of her work to date, encompassing all media from the past forty years. The show traveled to the Museum of ContemporaryArt Chicago and the Dallas Museum of Art in 2014. Also in 2014,Isa Genzken: New Workswaspresented at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg and subsequently traveled to the Museum für ModerneKunst, Frankfurt. In 2015, an extensive survey of Genzken’s work was presented by the Stedelijk Museum,Amsterdam. The show traveled to Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, in 2016. In 2019, Kunsthalle Bern inSwitzerland presented a solo exhibition of the artist’s work.Isa Genzken: Works from 1973–1983waspresented at the Kunstmuseum Basel in 2020, and subsequently at the KunstsammlungNordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, in 2021.
Her work has been prominently featured in international biennials and group exhibitions, including the 2007 Venice Biennale, where she represented Germany.
Work by the artist is represented in museum and public collections worldwide, including the DallasMuseum of Art; Gemeentemuseum, The Hague; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington,DC; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Museum ofContemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art,New York; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the VanAbbemuseum, Eindhoven. Genzken lives and works in Berlin.
For more information, please contact:
Julia Lukacher
+1 212 727 2070
jlukacher@davidzwirner.com
Victoria Kung
+852 9668 1092
victoriak@suttoncomms.com
Kiko Tse
+852 6015 5184
kiko@davidzwirner.com