Rebecca Horn: Bee's Planetary Map (1998)

16 TO 19 June 2022
  • Bee's Planetary Map (1998) by Rebecca Horn, installed at Art Basel Unlimited (2022)
    Installation view at Art Basel Unlimited, 2022
  • Bee's Planetary Map (1998) by Rebecca Horn, installed at Galerie Thomas Schulte (2021)
    Installation view at Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin, 2021.
    Bee's Planetary Map, 1998 In Bee's Planetary Map, 1998, inverted straw baskets, suggestive of beehives, are suspended from the ceiling at varying heights. Light from the baskets reflects off round, rotating mirrors on the floor, sweeping light throughout the space. The haunting buzz of swarming bees is punctuated at regular intervals by the intervention of a cobblestone on a cable falling from the ceiling above shards of broken mirror, which in turn cast their own shattered lines across the ceiling and walls. The repetitive act is simultaneously disturbing and cathartic. Conceived during the height of the Balkan War, which forcibly displaced millions across the region, Bee's Planetary Map evokes themes of dislocation, fractured movement, and a loss of equilibrium.
  • PROVENANCE

     The artist

    EXHIBITION HISTORY

    Unlimited, Art Basel 2022, Basel, Switzerland: 13 June to 20 June 2022
    Bee’s Planetary Map, Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin, Germany: 28 April to 26 June 2021
    Rebecca Horn: Théâtre des métamorphoses, Centre Pompidou-Metz, Metz, France: 8 June 2019 to 13 January 2020
    Concert for Buchenwald, Schloss Ettersburg, Ettersburg, Germany: 15 May to 15 October 1999
    Rebecca Horn, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, USA: 5 May to 13 June 1998

    ILLUSTRATION HISTORY

    Ackermann, Marion, Holzwarth, Hans Werner and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. Rebecca Horn - Moon Mirror. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2005. pp 144-146 (color).
    Horn, Rebecca and Sartorius, Joachim. The Vertebrae Oracle. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2014. p 114 (b&w).
    Horn, Rebecca and von Drathen, Doris. Rebecca Horn. Paris: Galerie Lelong, 2014. p 20 (color).
    Horn, Rebecca, Hasegawa, Yuko, von Drathen, Doris and Edelsztein, Sergio. Rebecca Horn. Kyōto: Tankōsha Publishing Co. and Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2009. p 125 (color).
    Horn, Rebecca, von Drathen, Doris, Groys, Boris and Mosebach, Martin. Concert for Buchenwald. Zurich: Scalo Verlag, 2000. pp 27-28 (color).
    Lavigne, Emma and Müller, Alexandra. Rebecca Horn : Théâtre des métamorphoses. Metz: Centre Pompidou - Metz, 2019. pp 112-113 (color).
    Museum Tinguely ed., Reimann, Sandra Beate. Rebecca Horn - Body Fantasies. Vienna: VfmK für moderne Kunst GmbH, 2019. p.143 (color).
    Von Drathen, Doris. Künstler: Rebecca Horn (II). Issue 8. Munich: ZEIT Kunstverlag GmbH & Co. KG, 2011. (color).
  • REBECCA HORN

    THE COLONIES OF BEES UNDERMINING THE MOLE'S SUBVERSIVE EFFORT THROUGH TIME

    NOTEBOOK, 27 SEPTEMBER 1997 - 15 MAY 1999

    (EXCERPT)

    ...
     
    Span an arch from Schloss Ettersburg over Buchenwald.
    The bees have lost their centre
    they swarm in dense clouds high above
    their radiant beehives are deserted.

    Wandering islands of light seek the lost ones
    casting an axis of escape
    to catch them up in fleeing motion
    shaping a planetary map of light anew.

    The beehives, the wandering light of colonies
    the attempt to flee destruction
    at the mercy of alchemistic processes:
    mirror of water, heated by cayenne pepper, turns to blood
    evaporates over fire into glowing light.

    Light alters the island poles of the bee swarms
    one of the colonies will always be destroyed
    eternally wandering and searching,
    writing signs in dark water
    the wind inscribes in sand,
    changing the signs.

    Labyrinths of moles
    with their ramified streams of energy they resemble
    the flight paths of the bees.
    They meet in human beings
    as a catalyst
    connecting the above and below of the mind.
    Through the process of transformation
    cautiously writing the language of new signs.

    Samson killed a young roaring lion.
    Inside its body he found a swarm of bees and honey.
    Releasing the bees, he bore the honey in his hands,
    eating and walking, he betrayed his secret to no one
  • Concert for Buchenwald, Installation at Schloss Ettersburg, Ettersburg, Germany, May 15 to October 15, 1999. Photography: Attilio Maranzano
  • “In all her work, Rebecca Horn consistently acknowledges the primacy of experience over symbolism, her goal being to articulate and demonstrate that art must be grasped not only in relation to its historical and formal structures but also from the viewpoint of the subject. Operating through signs and symbols, the circular interdependence between the self and the world is consistently revealed.”

    — Germano Celant, The Divine Comedy of Rebecca Horn, Rebecca Horn: The Inferno Paradiso Switch (Catalogue), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1993.
  • About the artist

    About the artist

    Rebecca Horn (born 1944 in Michelstadt, Germany) is one of a generation of German artists who came to international prominence in the 1980s, practicing body art and working in different media, including performance, installation art, sculpture, and film. She has been practising her art now for fifty years, during which time she has created her own symbolically charged cosmos in which reality and fiction overlap, and dualisms such as material/spirit, subject/object, male/female are transgressed.

     

    Having studied in Hamburg and London, from 1989, Rebecca Horn taught at the University of the Arts in Berlin for almost two decades. In 1972, she was the youngest artist to be invited by curator Harald Szeemann to present her work in documenta 5. Her work was later also included in documenta 6 (1977), 7 (1982) and 9 (1992) as well as in the Venice Biennale (1980; 1986; 1997), the Sydney Biennale (1982; 1988) and as part of Skulptur Projekte Münster (1997). Throughout her career she has received numerous awards including Kunstpreis der Böttcherstraße (1979), Arnold-Bode-Preis (1986), Carnegie Prize (1988), Kaiserring der Stadt Goslar (1992), ZKM Karlsruhe Medienkunstpreis (1992), Alexej von Jawlensky-Preis Wiesbaden (2007), Alice Salomon Poetik Preis, Berlin (2009), Praemium Imperiale Tokyo (2010), Pour le Mérite for Sciences and the Arts (2016) and, most recently, the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize (2017). A first mid-career retrospective of Horn’s work was organized in 1993 by the Guggenheim Museum, New York. It was the museum’s first solo exhibition dedicated to a female artist. The exhibition traveled to the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Nationalgalerie Berlin, Kunsthalle Wien, Tate Gallery and Serpentine Gallery in London, and the Musée de Grenoble. A second retrospective was presented at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2005. Another retrospective took place at Martin Gropius-Bau in Berlin in 2006. In 2019, both the Museum Tinguely in Basel and the Centre Pompidou-Metz were showing major retrospectives of her work. From 2021 to 2022, The Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien celebrated her with the second comprehensive retrospective of her works in Austria. Her work was also featured at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, entitled The Milk of Dreams and curated by Cecilia Alemani.