Isa Genzken OIL for the German Pavilion at the 52nd International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia
German Pavilion
Isa Genzken
OIL
German Pavilion at the 52nd International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia
June 10 – November 21, 2007
When in the summer of 2006 Witte de With’s director Nicolaus Schafhausen was appointed as curator for the German Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale, he asked Isa Genzken (b. 1948).
Schafhausen explained this choice by stating that “Genzken is one of the most uncompromising artists of today, capturing current times like almost no other contemporary artist”. For more than thirty years, Genzken has created a diverse oeuvre that spans sculpture, installation, photography, collage and film – a practice that continues to move and develop while constantly taking on new challenges. For Genzken, life and existence are just as complex as art itself. Her work stands in contradiction to a ‘one-trick pony’ society and culture, which searches for happiness in simple answers. This is perhaps why she is such an important influence for so many artists of subsequent generations.
Publication
Isa Genzken at the German Pavilion, Venice 2007, published by DuMont Literatur und Kunst Verlag, Cologne.
Texts by Liam Gillick, Vanessa Joan Müller, Juliane Rebentisch and Willem de Rooij. With a conversation between Isa Genzken and Nicolaus Schafhausen.
This official publication for the German contribution at the 52nd Venice Biennale focuses on Isa Genzken’s site-specific work for the pavilion. The authors offer a range of different approaches to her work – a diversity necessary for an understanding of the complexity inherent in the artist’s practice.
Statements from the ISA GENZKEN SPECIAL at Witte de With on March 24th:
“Isa Genzken was emerging out the new avant-garde, out of minimalism but doing something with it that was quite alien to its own terms. I think that this in some ways set the tone for her relationship to modernism in general.”