Rebecca Horn is an amazing artist everyone should know! She makes sculptural clothing, or body modification pieces, that she uses to play with the space around her. She primarily works with installations and as a performance artist. Horn originally worked using fibre glass, until she contracting acute lung poisoning from working without a mask on, meaning she had to drop out of art school and spend a year in a sanatorium recovering. While she was there both her parents died, causing her to feel “totally isolated”. Unable to use her traditional methods of creating art, due to being so weak from the illness, she took to using coloured pencils and creating sculptures using cloth and balsa wood. Whilst still bed ridden she found a way to explore her surroundings, making sculptures that became extensions of her body. She decided that a way to combat her loneliness was by “communicating through bodily forms”, and carried on creating works after she was recovered that were like extensions, or, conversely, like cocoons. I think from this she wanted to find a way to explore the spaces around her, while protecting herself from another bad thing happening to her. Through her work it seemed like she simultaneously wanted to display herself and hide herself away. The cocoon-like works seem at once like they are protecting the performer, and trapping them.
My favourite piece of hers is Finger Gloves (1972), which I referenced in my own work (Seen below).
The piece is made from cloth and balsa wood, using them to create long finger extensions so that the performer could touch the far walls and ceiling of the space at the same time. She later created a piece similar to this, but fitted exactly to the measurements of the room, so if the performer stood in the exact centre of the room they could precisely touch the walls at each end of the room at the same time. Horn wanted the work to feel as though the fingers were really extended, becoming a part of the wearer’s body, so they feel they are actually touching the walls or ceiling.
I love Rebecca Horn’s work, partly just as an instinctive reaction to the aesthetic (as all initial reactions to art are), but also because I love her ideas surrounding freedom and boundary – both being forced upon the performer and being broken by her.
Link to her page
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The White Cube Effect 