A woman walks under the trees of a dark and lush forest with an inexplicable flash above her head. When it is crossed by a few rays of sunlight, it is seen better. She is half-naked and walks in a wheat field, sporting a long, bright white horn attached to her body by straps. This is “Unicorn”, one of Rebecca Horn’s most remarkable performances, interpreted by one of her students, with whom she fully entered the avant-garde of world art in the seventies.
“It’s an iconic piece in his film series, where through the addition of prosthetics to the body, everything is transformed. It’s the idea of something that leaves your head and goes to the sky, taking your mind and thoughts to another sphere. His work is fresher today than ever, because it is completely political from a personal point of view and from his physical experience in the world,” explains Sergio Edelsztein, art curator and friend of the creator, who died last weekend.
Born in 1944 in Michelstadt, Germany, Rebecca Horn is a reference for different generations of artists, a cult author of the art world, whose multidisciplinary work is considered one of the most important of the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 20th century. the 20th century. Died on September 6 at the age of 80 in the city of Bad König, Hesse, Germany, the pioneer of feminist performance leaves behind an indisputable legacy, but also a very human side that all those close to her remember.
Her mark on history is that of a life dedicated to art and the exploration of the body, which has great importance internationally, but also in Spain, exhibiting her work first in Barcelona and, later, in Galicia and the Balearic Islands. . There is, however, a place of singular importance for the artist, which she remembers from trips with her parents, and that is the municipality of Pollença, in Mallorca, where she had a house-studio that served as a refuge for long periods.
“For me, she was a true art myth and seeing her pass through the Plaza de Pollença seemed impossible, as if I were meeting a movie star,” explains Catalina Joy, a local resident who worked with her in 2003 to organize her first exhibition in Mallorca, in the church of the Convent of Sant Domingo in Pollença. With this exhibition entitled “Moon Mirror”, Rebecca Horn brought her artistic activity to Mallorca after visiting the projects of the artists Susy Gómez and Jaume Plensa in the same space the two previous summers.
No one knows exactly when she arrived on the island, perhaps due to her reserved nature, but those who knew her agree that the artist began to be seen in Mallorca in the 1990s. She decided to settle in El Calvario, an emblematic place in the municipality of Pollença de la Serra de Tramuntana, after buying the house from an art dealer. The goldsmith Luisa del Valle, a friend of the designer for many years, remembers her arrival in this precise place, where they celebrated Christmas together accompanied by their friends, artists, writers and gallery owners of the time.
A year after the exhibition in Pollença, Rebecca Horn participated in the opening of the Es Baluard museum with the installation “The light trapped in the belly of the whale” in one of its most unique spaces, a restored old cistern of more than 350 meters. squares that once supplied fresh water to the entire neighborhood of Puig de Sant Pere and the ships that arrived at the port of Palma. The sea resonated strongly in her mind and it seemed to her that the cistern was a perfect place to host this work previously presented at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
For David Barro, current director of the Es Baluard Museum, one of the things that has always attracted him most to the museum is “the work ‘Three Graces in Blue’ by Rebecca Horn, permanently exhibited in one of the patios of the space and which belongs to the Collection, as well as ‘La Ferdinanda’. Rebecca Horn’s work is a great loss for contemporary art. Her memory will remain alive forever,” he concludes.
The Reina Sofía National Art Center Museum also has various works by the artist in its collection. Its director, Manuel Segade, highlights that Horn “is a pioneering artist of the second international wave of feminism through a vision that unites, through poetics, the female body and the machine not far from the natural world.” “In the collection we have many fundamental works from her career, but there are also more recent works from the 2000s, when she lived in Mallorca.”
She is a pioneering artist of the second international wave of feminism through a vision that unites, through poetics, the woman’s body and the machine at the gates of the natural world. In the collection that we have at the Reina Sofía we find many fundamental works of her career, but also more recent works from the 2000s, when she lived in Mallorca.
Manuel Segade
— Director of the Reina Sofia National Art Museum
Arts Education Beyond the Classroom
However, Rebecca Horn has not only dedicated herself to artistic creation throughout her career, but has also devoted herself particularly to teaching, as a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts. But she wanted to go further and so she tried to buy an abandoned factory in Pollença to build an artist residency center there. Unsuccessful, he founded the Moontower Foundation in the Odenwald region, near Frankfurt, a private foundation to which he devotes a large part of his time.
But beyond being a university professor, she also wanted to accompany her students outside the classroom as a curator of the projects they embarked on. Indeed, she organized the group exhibition “Rites of Passage” in 2008, bringing together her students Antonio Paucar, Ali Kaaf, Erick Meyenberg, Jakob Schaible, Carola Schmidt and Markus Wüste to exhibit their works in the Gallery. Major, founded, precisely, in Pollença.
Gallery owner Jero Martínez remembers that “she came to the gallery a lot, until one day she told us that she was very excited about organizing an exhibition of her students.” “So I went with her on a trip to Germany to meet them all and organize this project with which we made her work known in her home country,” she explains to elDiario.es.
One of Rebecca Horn’s most notable exhibitions on the island took place in 2009 at the Pelaires Gallery in Palma, which hosted the exhibition “Aigüestortes”. on the occasion of its 40th anniversary and which featured the German designer alongside Jannis Kounellis, one of the most prominent representatives of Arte Povera. During the assembly, art curator Pilar Rubí and director Pablo Bujosa documented the process in a film of the same title in which both artists reflect on artistic creation.
“It was very important for us that such an important artist decided to be part of our team. It’s something that goes beyond the local and takes us to another scale. We learned of her deteriorating health while we were preparing the group exhibition that we will inaugurate at the Nuit de l’Art where we will have her works. It’s a long relationship where we have worked with her for many years,” explains Frédéric Pinya, director of the gallery.
Inspired by her experiences in Mallorca, by the calm, tranquility and light, the German artist presented the proposal “Glowing Core” at Sa Llotja in Palma, a 2015 exhibition created from various materials such as mirrors, steel or electronic circuits with which He approached the figure of Ramon Llull, considered one of the first writers to use the Catalan language in philosophical and scientific texts.
The poetry of the Camino de Santiago
Far from his Majorcan refuge, in Galicia, his first retrospective exhibition in Spain takes place. Miguel Fernández-Cid, Director of the Galician Centre for Contemporary Art (CGAC) between 1998 and 2005, he says that when he arrived at the museum he organised an exhibition dedicated to the Italian artist and sculptor Giuseppe Penone, to whom he told that one of his dreams was to show Rebecca’s work. A few weeks later, I started organising the project.
“She was working on the idea of the pilgrimage and we talked about the importance of Santiago and Finisterre, a religious and pagan pilgrimage. Since 2000 was the Xacobeo year, we proposed that the CGAC be the first venue for the retrospective she was preparing and she accepted with enthusiasm,” explains Fernández-Cid, who remembers with enthusiasm that the artist dedicated a catalogue of the exhibition to each of the artists and workers of the museum.
The cultural manager and then chief curator of the CGAC, Cecilia Pereira, also accompanied the German designer during the project, which she considers “an unthinkable dream” in which Rebecca Horn and thirteen of her students walked the Camino de Santiago from different points creating a work that they conceived during the pilgrimage. Pereira emphasizes the importance of the poetic, painful and introspective character of her work, assuring that the artist “has already worked on the vulnerability that is now so fashionable.”
Nine years ago, Rebecca Horn suffered a stroke that left her in a delicate state of health and with difficulties that did not allow her to continue to carry out her work at full capacity. Her departure leaves a legacy to the world of contemporary art that will remain in the memory of those who visited her exhibitions, her acquaintances, her collections and especially her students.
