Renowned installation artist Rebecca Horn dies at 80

By Nada Weigelt, dpa I Sunday, Sept. 08, 2024

 

BERLIN – German installation artist Rebecca Horn is dead. She was 80, Dpa was told.

Peter Raue, head of Horn’s Moontower Foundation, confirmed that the artist passed away on Friday evening.

Horn, a sculpture artist who also created body art and performance works, was known as one of the most important German artists of her era.

“In my exhibitions or films, people become part of my images,” Horn said in an interview with dpa on her 70th birthday.

“Not only do they move, but so do my sculptures. And suddenly they encounter each other in a rotating mirror and become part of this artistic process,” she added.

Born in 1944, Horn, the daughter of a wealthy textile manufacturer, studied at art colleges in Hamburg and London before living in New York and Paris.

Her studies were interrupted with a two-year stay in hospital due to pneumonia which coincided with the death of her parents.

Horn began writing and drawing while recovering and began to make a name for herself with her sculpture “Unicorn” in 1970.

In 1989, she became the first female professor at the University of the Arts in Berlin, where she taught for almost two decades.

As early as 1993, the Guggenheim Museum dedicated a major retrospective to Horn, which later went on a European tour.

Rebecca Horn held more than 100 solo exhibitions worldwide. She received Japan’s prestigious Praemium Imperiale – awarded to artists who have contributed significantly to the development of international arts and culture – in 2010.

In 2007, Horn was able to buy back her family’s former property in the western German state of Hesse.

She also founded the Moontower Foundation to preserve her work and support young artists.

After suffering a stroke in 2015, Horn was confined to a wheelchair. However, the artist told dpa that she did not fear death.

“My connection to Buddhism has helped me. You are integrated into a process that goes on forever,” she said.