Basic Research

‘For these Genzken developed her own technique: she placed a canvas on the floor and spread two colors across it with a squeegee so as to get a two dimensional impression of the surface structure. Traces of her earlier work processes that remained on the concrete floor of her studio emerged, visibly, in the print of the floor's surface on the canvas. Although these marks were not registered photographically per se, the result is reminiscent both in form and content, of a photograph - and, in a larger sense, an artist’s portrait, represented by an index of her activities in the studio’ (S. Breitwieser, ’The Characters of Isa Genzken: Between the Personal and the Constructive, 1970-1996’, in Isa Genzken: Retrospective, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2013-2014, p. 40).