A motorised spear turns on the centre of Rebecca Horn’s set up Slicing By the Previous (1992-93), housed on the Castello di Rivoli close to Turin. It pierces 5 wood doorways in a 360-degree movement someplace between “a caress” and “a surgical lower”, says the museum’s chief curator, Marcella Beccaria. Encapsulating each the German artist’s repertoire of kinetic objects and her curiosity in reminiscence, the work was a “triggering level” for Castello di Rivoli’s survey of the identical identify.
This isn’t solely the primary main exhibition in Italy to be devoted to Horn, however the first since her loss of life final September, aged 80. “We felt an urgency to take a look at the legacy of Rebecca’s work—for the primary time with out the potential for relying on Rebecca herself,” Beccaria says.
The present is a co-operation with Munich’s Haus der Kunst, which staged a wide-ranging retrospective of Horn’s six-decade profession shortly earlier than she died. That exhibition positioned choreography as a central preoccupation uniting her works—from her pioneering Seventies performances with wearable “physique extensions” to the large-scale installations beginning within the 90s. “Rebecca Horn exhibits us how a lot power connects us,” says Jana Baumann, the senior curator at Haus der Kunst. “Instantly after putting in in Munich, we might actually deeply really feel what the work does with you within the house.”
Protean and prolific, Horn’s work requires “a pointy, exact strategy” to curation, Baumann says. And at Castello di Rivoli, Beccaria guarantees a “very particular view” that may give attention to the non secular issues of Horn’s lesser identified later works, and on drawing as a “continuum” underpinning her observe from the Nineteen Sixties onward. A bunch of early drawings depict the feminine physique as a locus of power, an concept that “explodes” within the late Bodylandscapes drawings from the 2000s and 2010s, Beccaria says.
Time and pressure
The imprint of Horn’s expertise of sickness and isolation in her 20s—when she spent a yr in a sanatorium—may be seen within the early efficiency movies that may make up the center of the exhibition. Movies comparable to Der Eintänzer (the dancer, 1978) have a “particular grammar” involved with the sluggish passage of time and the strain “between being confined and searching for freedom”, Beccaria says.
The exhibition can even discover the recurring motif of circles, from the “protecting” imagery of fan-like wings and feathered cocoons within the Seventies performances and movies, to the late drawings, the place their radius corresponds to the span of the artist’s arms. “They’ve a really sturdy non secular connotation,” Beccaria says. The present will culminate within the sculpture Das Rad der Zeit (the wheel of time, 2016), which refers back to the Buddhist idea of existence as an infinite cycle.
Circularity can be woven into the design of the exhibition itself. Horn’s works will occupy the Manica Lunga, the slim, corridor-like wing of Castello di Rivoli. The structure “obliges viewers to maneuver in a single path”, Beccaria explains, earlier than turning and retracing their steps.
• Rebecca Horn: Slicing By the Previous, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin, 23 Might-21 September
