Since the mid seventies, Isa Genzken b. During this period, her work groups, which are wide-ranging and surprising in terms of both form and the media used, have involved her public in a constantly fresh examination of the meanings and function-modes of artistic propositions. Here Isa Genzken focuses on the medium of sculpture. This has not been such a presence in art in recent years, but a younger generation of artists is once more making it central to its creative activities.
Genzken's work, both historically and actually, is impressive in this context, not just because of its consistent development, which is inherent in the work, but also in the precise analysis, critical of both the age and of art, that she regularly and effortlessly leaves behind her. Her work concentrates on the ways in which the reality that surrounds and shapes us operate: architecture, design, advertising, media, socio-political themes and fields of tension linked with them, tensions between private and public, permeable and hermetic, subjective and objective.
Genzken always formulates the work of art as an autonomous unit. It cannot become a mere object, and certainly not an escapist object, because it confronts us with individuality, but also with subjectivity and even intimacy, as realities. Thus the relationships, conditions and effects that make up our view of the art object itself, our view of general and social reality, are open to question.
In the late seventies, Isa Genzken attracted attention with her painted wooden works oriented towards abstract sculpture, the "Ellipsoids" and "Hyperbolos". These floor works between 5 and 10 metres long transfer the sculptural formulations of Minimal Art, especially the choice of industrially produced materials and the view of sculpture as a location or place e.
Carl Andre , into the field of ideas, of "up-to-date" technology they were calculated by computer and into the field of fictionalized space and of the illusionistic art object: their impressive presence in the space derives both from their format and from their painterly treatment. They touch real space in one or two places at the most, their form is part of, the reality of, a concept of space that is conceived more broadly, of a space that is different from the space we really experience in a gallery or museum.
