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Rebecca Horn (24 March 1944 – 6 September 2024) was a German visual artist best known for her installation art, film directing and body modifications such as Einhorn (Unicorn), a body-suit with a very large horn projecting vertically from the headpiece. While living in Paris and Berlin, she worked in film, sculpture and performance, directing the films Der Eintänzer (1978), La ferdinanda: Sonate für eine Medici-Villa (1982) and Buster's Bedroom (1990).Brenson, Michael. Buster Keaton Inspires a Spooky German Film. The New York Times. 4 November 1990
In 1963 she attended the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts). "Rebecca Horn Biography" , Rebecca Horn, Retrieved 13 November 2014. In 1964, she had to pull out of art school because she had contracted severe lung inflammation due to fiberglass. "In 1964 I was 20 years old and living in Barcelona, in one of those hotels where you rent rooms by the hour. I was working with glass fibre, without a mask, because nobody said it was dangerous, and I got very sick. For a year I was in a sanatorium. My parents died. I was totally isolated."
After leaving the sanatorium Horn began using soft materials, creating sculptures informed by her illness and long convalescence.
Horn was one of a generation of German artists who came to international prominence in the 1980s. Rebecca Horn, Concert for Anarchy (1990) Tate Collection. She practiced body art, but worked in different media, including performance art, installation art, sculpture and film. She also wrote poetry. Sometimes her poetry was influenced by her work and sometimes vice-versa. When she returned to the Hamburg academy she continued to make cocoon-like things. She worked with padded body extensions and prosthetic bandages. In the late 1960s she began creating performance art and continued to use bodily extensions.
Pencil Mask is another body extension piece, made up of six straps running horizontally and three straps running vertically. Where the straps intersect a pencil has been attached. When moving her face back and forth on a near a wall the pencil marks that are made correspond directly with her movements.
In 1972 she created Finger Gloves, a performance piece and the main prop of that performance piece. They are worn like gloves, but the finger form extends with balsa wood and cloth. By being able to see what she was touching and the way in which she was touching it, it felt as if her fingers were extended and in her mind the illusion was created that she was actually touching what the extensions were touching. A similar work called "Scratching Both Walls at Once" was part of her 1974 Berlin Exercises series. In this piece, the finger extension gloves she created were longer, measured to specifically fit the performance space. If the chosen participant stood in the middle of the room, they could exactly touch opposing walls simultaneously.
Another piece that involves the illusion of feeling with one's hand is Feather Fingers. (1972). A feather is attached to each finger with a metal ring. The hand becomes "as symmetrical (and as sensitive) as a bird's wing". When touching the opposite arm with these feather fingers one can feel the touch on the left arm and of the fingers on the right hand moving as if to touch the left arm, but it is instead the feathers which make contact. Horn described the effect: "It is as if one hand had suddenly become disconnected from the other like two utterly unrelated beings. My sense of touch becomes so disrupted that the different behavior of each hand triggers contradictory sensations." This piece focuses greatly on sensitivity.
In the 1980s, various "machines" were the subjects of Horn's work. Among others, she created a machine to mimic the human act of painting in The Little Painting School Performs a Waterfall (1988). Thirteen feet above the floor on a gallery wall, three fan-shaped paint brushes mounted on flexible metal arms slowly flutter down into cups filled with blue and green acrylic paint. After a few seconds of immersion they snap backward, spattering paint onto the wall, the ceiling, the floor and canvases projected from the wall below. The brushes immediately resume their descent and the cycle is repeated until each canvas is covered in paint. Rebecca Horn, The Little Painting School Performs a Waterfall (1988) Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
In the 1990s a series of her sculptures were presented in places of historical importance. Examples are the Tower of the Nameless in Vienna (1994), Concert in Reverse in Munich (1997), Mirror of the Night in an abandoned synagogue in Cologne (1998) and Concert for Buchenwald at Weimar (1999). In Weimar, the Concert for Buchenwald was composed on the premises of a former tram depot. Horn layered 40 metre long walls of ashes behind glass, as archives of petrifaction. Rebecca Horn Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. At the same time, the theme of bodily vitality, which she had been exploring since the 1970s, was developed in site-specific art installations that investigated the subject of the latent energy of places and the magnetic flows of space. This cycle comprises High Moon, New York (1991), El Reio de la Luna, Barcelona (1992) and Spirit di Madreperla, Naples (2002). For the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Horn was commissioned to create the steel sculpture L'Estel Ferit.
Many Horn works also explore ambiguities in the idea of . One would think that a large tinted lens exists for protection and cover, but it also has the effect of drawing attention to the person or figure behind it. The paradox of looking out and looking back is explored in her installation piece for Taipei 101, Dialogue between Yin and Yang (2002). The work sets up interactions between viewers, environment and sculpture as it uses binoculars and mirrors to suggest the passive and active energies.Publicly posted material, Floor 89, Taipei 101. 17 August 2007.
In all of these films Horn's obsession with the imperfect body and the balance between figure and objects is apparent. She also collaborated with Jannis Kounellis and produced some films, including the film Buster's Bedroom (1990) which was shot by the Academy Award-winning Sven Nykvist and stars Donald Sutherland, Geraldine Chaplin and Martin Wuttke.William Wilson (2 October 1990), Rebecca Horn Clobbers Convention Los Angeles Times. For Buster's Bedroom und Roussel, she collaborated with German writer Martin Mosebach on the respective screenplays.
A number of Horn's mechanised sculptures appeared in her films, notably The Feathered Prison Fan (1978)—covered in large overlapping fans that is big enough to enclose an adult inside—in Der Eintänzer and The Peacock Machine (1979–80), another sculpture that folds and unfolds white peacock plumage in La Ferdinanda.
After a stroke in 2015, Horn withdrew from the public. She died in Bad König, Hesse, Germany on 6 September 2024, at the age of 80.
In 1992, Horn became the first woman to receive the prestigious Goslarer Kaiserring, and was awarded the Medienkunstpreis Karlsruhe for achievements in technology and art. She was later awarded the 2010 Praemium Imperiale in Sculpture and the Grande Médaille des Arts Plastiques 2011 from the Académie d'Architecture de Paris. Rebecca Horn: Ravens Gold Rush, 28 October – 3 December 2011 Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.
In 2012, Horn received the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art. She was member of the order Pour le Mérite. In 2019, she received the Knight Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.
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