A new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Savile Row displays a series of new and recent work by Berlin-based artist Isa Genzken, whose work translates into three-dimensional form
the way that art, architecture, design and media affects the experience of urban life. Genzken is inspired by the stark severity of modernist architecture and the chaotic energy of the city, as well as by art history, the aesthetics of the great American artists of the Sixties and pop culture.
Genzken's totemic columns, pedestal works and collages combine disparate aspects from many sources in nonsensical, harmonious sculptures: precariously
stacked assemblages of potted plants,
designer furniture, empty shipping
crates and photographs, among other
things, arranged with the traditions of
modernist sculpture in mind. Devoid
of the weightiness and overpowering scale
seen in the sculptures of Genzken's Minimalist
predecessors, these works abandon notions
of order and power, allowing the viewer
to relate to the works' inherently human
qualities of fragility and vulnerability. "I have always said that with any sculpture you have to be able to say, although this is not a
ready-made, it could be one," has said Genzken. "That's what a sculpture has to look like. It must have a certain
relation to reality".
Isa Genzken at H&W
A new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Savile Row displays a series of new and recent work by the Berlin-based artist, whose totemic columns, pedestal works and collages present inherently human qualities of fragility and vulnerability.
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- 16 November 2012
- London
Both sculpture and photography combine
and overlap in the artist's collages, whose
dense surfaces are formed from magazines,
flyers, snapshots of friends, self-portraits
and reproduced artworks. At Hauser & Wirth, Genzken makes
use of all surfaces of the gallery, including
an on-going series of collages that span the
floor of the space.
Through 12 January 2013
Isa Genzken
Hauser & Wirth Savile Row
23 Savile Row, London