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. Last year and until the beginning of 2022, The Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien celebrated her with the second comprehensive retrospective of her works in Austria. This year, her work is featured at the Venice Biennale, entitled The Milk of Dreams and curated by Cecilia Alemani.
