The comprehensive solo exhibition brings together large-scale installations and kinetic sculptures from four decades and is among the first major presentations of the artist’s work since her death. Rebecca Horn (1944–2024) is internationally regarded as one of the most important German artists of the contemporary era.
Horn first gained recognition in the late 1960s with her so-called body extensions—objects that extend the human body and that she activated in performances. The starting point for these works was a prolonged hospital stay during her art studies in Hamburg, an experience that left a lasting mark on her and sparked her interest in fragility, isolation, and the limits of human existence.
In 1972, she participated as the youngest artist in Documenta 5, curated by Harald Szeemann, and later exhibited several more times at the major Kassel exhibition. She achieved international prominence in 1993 with a major retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York—the first ever devoted to a female artist. Horn’s poetic sculptures and spatial installations are particularly powerful in their interaction with architecture and surroundings. All the more fitting, then, is the exhibition venue: the expansive Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden, run by the British sculptor Tony Cragg since 2008 and, with its exhibition halls and park landscape, considered one of the most beautiful art venues in Germany.
