Rebecca Horn

Origins and early life

Rebecca Horn was born at Michelstadt in the Odenwald on 24 March 1944 to Jewish parents, textile manufacturers — her father Ernst Horn and his wife, her grandfather the owner of a textile mill at Bad König — and the family was in hiding in the forests of southern Germany at her birth because of that identity.

Work and career

This fiche states that plainly, and states as plainly that she was not raised in Jewish religious practice; the family belonged to the German Jewish industrial middle class that the Nazi years destroyed. She studied at Hamburg, and while working with polyester and fibreglass without a mask suffered severe lung poisoning that put her in a sanatorium for a year at twenty-four, isolated and unable to work with materials.

Out of that immobility came her first works: soft sculptures made to be worn, extensions of the body built for one person — the Unicorn, a woman walking through a field with a horn strapped upright to her head; the Finger Gloves, which lengthen the hands until they touch the walls of a room without moving; masks of pencils that draw by the turning of a head; feathered wings that open and close around the wearer. They are about the distance between a body and the world, and they were made by someone who had just spent a year unable to cross it.

From the 1980s she built kinetic sculpture: pianos suspended upside down that empty their keys, mechanical peacocks, machines that write in ink on walls, installed in the Berlin Reichstag, in a former prison in Münster and in the museums of the world. She showed at Documenta four times, won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 1990 for her film Buster's Bedroom, the Kaiserring of Goslar and the Praemium Imperiale, and taught in Berlin for two decades. She died at Bad König on 6 September 2024.