Rebecca Horn

Rebecca Horn

(Michelstadt, Germany, 1944 – Bad König, 2024)

Since the end of the 1960s, Rebecca Horn has been committed to overcoming the limits defined by traditional artistic languages, with an art form capable of directly involving spectators in the creative act. Horn creates performances, installations and films, in which machines are often essential components: mechanical devices that with their movements recreate a disturbing parallel world, dominated by obsessions, desires and power relations.

The work Cutting through the past, 1992-1993, presents five doors that show the signs of the past time. Installed on a platform, the doors bring to mind a domestic environment, the theater of private stories. At the center of the platform, an electric motor drives a metal rod that rotates in a horizontal position and in a circular manner. The tip of the rod touching each of the doors digs into the end with a relentless gesture. The work evokes an atmosphere of tension and conflict, which unites but at the same time destroys the space within which it is contained.