Rebecca Horn

From June 2019, the Centre Pompidou-Metz and Museum Tinguely in Basel present two parallel exhibitions devoted to the artist Rebecca Horn, offering complementary insights into the work of an artist who is among the most extraordinary of her generation . The exhibition Theatre of Metamorphoses explores in Metz the diverse theme of transformation from animist, surrealist and mechanistic perspectives, placing special emphasis on the role of film as a matrix within Horn’s work. In the Body Fantasies show in Basel, which combines early performative works and later kinetic sculpture to highlight lines of development within her oeuvre, the focus is on transformation processes of body and machine.

The exhibition Theatre of Metamorphoses at the Centre Pompidou-Metz highlights the rich range of forms of expression used by the artist. Following a lung illness, Rebecca Horn used the body as her preferred material in her works. Through her taste for paradoxical associations, she tirelessly makes theatre out of the oppositions which are inherent in our lives: subject and object, body and machine, human and animal, desire and violence, strength and infirmity, harmony and disorder. The living and the inert appear transfigured, the object is endowed with a soul, the individual is characterised by his physical frailty and his capacity to reinvent himself. From there is born the troubling strangeness of her work.