Rebecca Horn - The state of the soul

Rebecca Horn (Michelstadt, Germany, 1944) is one of the most singular and influential artists of the past half century. Working across sculpture, performance, film, installation, and drawing, she has built a body of work that defies categorization — intimate and monumental, poetic and mechanical, deeply personal and cosmically scaled.

Her practice began in the late 1960s with body extensions: wearable sculptures that amplified, constrained, or transformed the human form. Forced to spend a year in a sanatorium after suffering lung damage from working with polyester without protection, Horn used that period of isolation to develop her first works — objects that mediated between her body and the world she could no longer freely inhabit. That tension between confinement and expansion, between touch and distance, never left her work.

Over the decades, her sculptures evolved into autonomous machines: pendulums that swing and scatter pigment, funnels that pour and overflow, feathers that caress empty space. These kinetic works operate on thresholds — between control and chance, silence and gesture, the organic and the mechanical. They seem to breathe. They leave traces.

Horn has also made films — most notably Buster's Bedroom (1990) and La Ferdinanda (1981) — that extend her sculptural thinking into narrative space, blurring the line between body, architecture, and memory.

Her work has been shown at the Venice Biennale, Documenta, the Guggenheim, the Tate, and major institutions worldwide. In 2017 she was awarded the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize, one of Germany's most prestigious sculpture prizes, in recognition of a practice that has fundamentally reshaped how we think about the body, the object, and the space between them.