Generously illustrated essays consider Isa Genzken's remarkable body
of work, from her early elegant floor pieces to her later explosive
assemblages.
Since the late 1970s, the Berlin-based contemporary artist Isa Genzken
(b. 1948) has produced a body of work that is remarkable for its formal
and material inventiveness. In her sculptural practice, Genzken has
developed an expanded material repertoire that includes plaster,
concrete, epoxy resin, and mass-produced objects that range from action
figures to discarded pizza boxes. Her heterogeneous assemblages, a New
York Times critic observes, are "brash, improvisational, full of
searing color and attitude." Genzken, the recent subject of a major
retrospective at MoMA, offers a highly original interpretation of
modernist, avant-garde, and postminimalist practices even as she engages
pressing sociopolitics and economic issues of the present.
These illustrated essays address the full span of Genzken's work, from
the elegant floor sculptures with which she began her career to the
assemblages, bursting with color and bristling with bric-a-brac, that
she has produced since the beginning of the millennium. The texts, by
writers including Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and the artist
herself, consider her formation in the West German milieu; her critique
of conventions of architecture, reconstruction, and memorialization; her
sympathy with mass culture; and her ongoing interrogation of public and
private spheres. Two texts appear in English for the first time,
including a quasi-autobiographical screenplay written by Genzken in
1993.
**Contributors
**Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Diedrich Diederichsen, Hal
Foster, Isa Genzken, Isabelle Graw, Lisa Lee, Pamela M. Lee, Birgit
Pelzer, Juliane Rebentisch, Josef Strau, Wolfgang Tillmans, Lawrence
Weiner
**Contents
**Isa Genzken: Two Exercises (1974) - Birgit Pelzer: Axiomatics Subject
to Withdrawal (1979) - Benjamin H. D. Buchloh: Isa Genzken: The Fragment
as Model (1992) - Benjamin H. D. Buchloh: Isa Genzken: Fuck the Bauhaus.
Architecture, Design, and Photography in Reverse (2014) - Isa Genzken:
Sketches for a Feature Film (1993) - Isabelle Graw: Free to Be
Dependent: Concessions in the Work of Isa Genzken (1996) - Diedrich
Diederichsen: Subjects at the End of the Flagpole (2000) - Pamela M.
Lee: The Skyscraper at Ear Level (2003) - Benjamin H. D. Buchloh: All
Things Being Equal (2005) - Wolfgang Tillmans: Isa Genzken: A
Conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans (2003) - Diedrich Diederichsen:
Diedrich Diederichsen in Conversation with Isa Genzken (2006) - Lisa
Lee: "Make Life Beautiful!" The Diabolic in the Work of Isa Genzken (A
Tour Through Berlin, Paris, and New York) (2007) - Lawrence Weiner: Isa
Genzken Again (2010) - Juliane Rebentisch: The Dialectic of Beauty: On
the Work of Isa Genzken (2007) - Yve-Alain Bois: The Bum and the
Architect (2007) - Josef Strau: Isa Genzken: Sculpture as Narrative
Urbanism (2009) - Hal Foster: Fantastic Destruction (2014)
