Rebecca Horn, the German installation artist known for her surreal and sensual “art machines” that incorporated musical instruments, bird feathers and mechanical engineering, has died aged 80, her foundation confirmed.
According to Moontower FoundationHorn died on Friday evening in his hometown of Bad König in the Odenwald region of western Germany.
Born in 1944, one year before the end of World War II, Horn studied in Hamburg and London before achieving fame as an artist in New York and Paris.
Her early work bore characteristics of the Fluxus movement, and in the late 1960s and 1970s she unicornShe created the costume so that her classmates could take a half-naked walk through the woods one summer morning.
Masks and headdresses became common features, and in 1972 she Pencil Mask The piece, decorated with spiked pencils, instructs the wearer to rhythmically move their head from left to right in front of a white canvas wall.
Musical instruments such as pianos and violins are also common elements: in 1992 Horn was commissioned by singer Peter Gabriel to create a visualisation of his song “Secret World”, creating an installation using a violin bow and opera binoculars in an old suitcase he bought at a Berlin flea market.
One of her best-known works is from 1994. Tree of Turtle's Sighis an oversized grove of trees made of copper pipes which at regular intervals emits shrill cries and cries in various languages.
Speaking to The Guardian in 2005, Horn said that the troubled history of her native German language was part of what drew her to the visual arts. “We couldn't speak German. Germans were hated,” she said. “I had to learn French and English. We were always travelling somewhere else, speaking another language. But I had a Romanian tutor who taught me how to draw. I didn't have to draw in German or French or English. I just had to draw.”
In addition to installations and sculpture, Horn has also written literary works and screenplays, directed films and operas, and directed the 1990 indie comedy Buster's Bedroom, starring Donald Sutherland and Geraldine Chaplin, which paid homage to the slapstick icon Buster Keaton, a lifelong inspiration for her work.
In 2007, Horn set up a studio in a former family factory in Bad König. Moontower FoundationHorn has been a private person since 2015, when she retired from public life after suffering a stroke.
