| Rebecca Horn is a major representative of the contemporary German art world, and has been well-known since the early 1970s for her numerous performances that sought to improve communications with others and develop a rapport with nature. Following her participation in the Documenta V show in her 20s, Horn has energetically explored one new territory of art after another, thus capturing the fascination of not only audiences of visual art, but dance and film enthusiasts. The devices Horn wore to enhance physical perceptions in her early performances developed into independent, kinetic-mechanical sculptural works. |  |
Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo
Rebecca Horn is a major representative of the contemporary German art world, and has been well-known since the early 1970s for her numerous performances that sought to improve communications with others and develop a rapport with nature. Following her participation in the Documenta V show in her 20s, Horn has energetically explored one new territory of art after another, thus capturing the fascination of not only audiences of visual art, but dance and film enthusiasts.
The devices Horn wore to enhance physical perceptions in her early performances developed into independent, kinetic-mechanical sculptural works. Later, in the full-length films she undertook during her ten years of life in the United States, she incorporated these moving sculptures into her own developing universe of film. After moving back to her home country in the 1980s, her work shifted to directly confront modern history, displaying an ability to tie together personal experience with social memory that again garnered high acclaim. Her recent work includes paintings as well as collaborations with a composer to create installations and stage designs. Through her freely developing creative output, Horn constantly probes the possibilities of contemporary art.
A traveling exhibition of the German Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations), which features Horn’s most representative film footage—from performance records to full-length films—served as the starting point for this exhibition. Under the title Rebellion in Silence: Dialogue between Raven and Whale, the show traces the development of this artist’s career, which spans and interrelates various media, bringing together new works created for the exhibition as well as recent paintings, sculptures, and installations in the artist’s collection. Also, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MOT) presents Horn’s new work, The Raven Tree, which was made especially for the exhibition at MOT. Her visit to Kyoto in 1984 inspired her to make this sculpture, which represents the concept for this exhibition.
For the first time, MOT shares with Japanese audiences a full-scale exhibition of Horn’s work, presenting an unparalleled opportunity to experience this highly original, creative trajectory that transforms—via movement, light, and the traces of such—the flow of various invisible energies of humans and nature into visible form.
