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拍品专文
Awarded the 2019 Nasher Prize for her extraordinary impact on and unwavering dedication to sculpture, Isa Genzken’s transformative vision is exemplified in Corridor, 1988. In the present work, warmly tactile slabs of textured concrete stand atop a slender steel base. These horizontal bands are defined by liquid ribbons of poured concrete. A single slim extrusion graces one side. Corridor is part of a larger engagement with concrete that Genzken began in 1986; aesthetically, these sculptures resemble Brutalist architecture, a style which emerged in the early 20th century. Championed by the French architect Le Corbusier, such buildings are characterised by thick, weighty exteriors cast in predominantly monochromatic palette, echoes of which can be seen in the roughly hewn, weathered exterior of Corridor. Often described as maquettes, Genzken encourages such readings by displaying her sculptures at eye level. From this vantage point, these works conjure a skeletal city and an otherworldly urban terrain.
Genzken came of age during Germany’s post-war building boom, and the evolution of architectural has long fascinated the artist. In early photographs taken while studying at Berlin’s University of Fine Arts, Genzken captured the country’s transmuting landscape of crumbling façades juxtaposed with sleek new structures. Like the concrete works, these images too present new and peculiar perspectives, revealing an ongoing dialogue between preservation and change. Like the remnants that littered the German landscape of her youth, the concrete works, too, summon a formerly idealised world that has since fragmented and splintered. In Genzken’s practice, edifices necessarily metamorphosise into ruins. Yet her inspiration comes not from a Romantic collapse, but rather is located in the actual physics of a structure where ‘the rational thinking of the engineers has more to do with truth’ than any exteranl décor (I. Genzken quoted in K. Bussmann and K. König (eds.), Skulptur Projekte Münster, exh. cat., Westphalian State Museum of Art and Cultural History, Münster, 1987, p. 94). In the exposed fissures and hollows of Corridor there exists a candid and grounded hope for regeneration. These forms announce a new architecture which alternates between fragmentary and holistic, illusory and substantial, potent, capacious and palpable.
Genzken came of age during Germany’s post-war building boom, and the evolution of architectural has long fascinated the artist. In early photographs taken while studying at Berlin’s University of Fine Arts, Genzken captured the country’s transmuting landscape of crumbling façades juxtaposed with sleek new structures. Like the concrete works, these images too present new and peculiar perspectives, revealing an ongoing dialogue between preservation and change. Like the remnants that littered the German landscape of her youth, the concrete works, too, summon a formerly idealised world that has since fragmented and splintered. In Genzken’s practice, edifices necessarily metamorphosise into ruins. Yet her inspiration comes not from a Romantic collapse, but rather is located in the actual physics of a structure where ‘the rational thinking of the engineers has more to do with truth’ than any exteranl décor (I. Genzken quoted in K. Bussmann and K. König (eds.), Skulptur Projekte Münster, exh. cat., Westphalian State Museum of Art and Cultural History, Münster, 1987, p. 94). In the exposed fissures and hollows of Corridor there exists a candid and grounded hope for regeneration. These forms announce a new architecture which alternates between fragmentary and holistic, illusory and substantial, potent, capacious and palpable.