Isa Genzken

Description

Facsimile of an artist book that Genzken created about 15 years ago in Berlin and published on the occasion of the exhibition at the Stedelijk, Amsterdam (29.11.2015-11.03.2016). The book, a scrapbook in the style of Genzken#x92;s well-known publication 'I Love New York, Crazy City', is full of playful collages in which she reflects on big-city life, media culture, sexual identity, and her own biography. The original publication is on view in the exhibition.

Description

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.

Subjects

Other Editions

• Isa GenzkenHardcoverThe MIT Press2015-01-23
• Isa GenzkenVerlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig2016-01-01
• Isa GenzkenVerlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig2020-01-01