My favourite piece of sculpture is a solid wall with a hole in it to frame the space on the other side.
- Andy Warhol

1.
Many authors who have written on Isa Genzken emphasise the disparate nature of her work, and indeed, an unusual variety and diversity in both medium and formal vocabulary is characteristic of her extensive practice. I would like to start by outlining its structure: Genzken's focus is on sculpture, developed through different series of work that vary so much from each other that it may not even be immediately apparent that they are made by the same artist. From 1976-85 she developed colourful sculptures made out of wood mainly ellipsoids and hyperboloids,¹ and followed them with a group of sculptures made from plaster. A large group between 1986-92 consists of works in concrete, a material she initially used to create model-like spaces and architectural structures on steel constructions until she moved on to an intense exploration of windows and paravents, something she continues using epoxy resin. In the early 1990s, Genzken worked with the same material - though clearly removed from the severity of her earlier constructions - to produce colourful rotating columns and hoods, as well as lamps. With the Babies, assemblages made mostly from kitchen utensils and hung on the wall, she moves in a different direction again, leading to the Saulen (Columns) that she has been working on over the past two years. Besides this, and her public work, she has produced films and videos, drawings, photographs, works in oil on canvas, collages, collage books, film scripts and a record.

In these circumstances, the desire of writers to resolve this heterogeneity and look for overall interpretations is understandable. They start by assuming the diversity is a calculated strategy of non-fulfilment in order to avoid predictability² or attempt to identify a progressive increase in social references as a thread running through her work.³ It is certainly more useful to shift the question from the work towards the audience and its reception,⁴ but such a desire to resolve inconsistencies is based on the idea of an artistic canon and an expectation that the artist's distinctive style should remain recognisable. Not only has Isa Genzken purposefully ignored these mechanisms but sought to avoid any kind of label, not so much to criticize or subvert the art system but to stay true to the logic of her own work.

2.
Isa Genzken is a traditional sculptor. She claims the possibility and relevance of autonomous sculpture, the justification for which was critically questioned in past decades, eventually emerging from this process in a fairly battered state. In the 1960s and 70s, the attempt to expand the concept of sculpture led to a discrimination against the art object and, eventually, to its dematerialisation. After a short break, this disintegration moved in a different direction, towards an absorption into the real. What had started successfully with photography and the use of everyday objects, continued with art's systematic mimicry of other disciplines, be it science, popular culture, architecture or design. Against this background, Genzken's work could be described as an ambitious attempt to expand sculpture without eliminating it. She does so by spreading out and investigating the spectrum of possibilities for sculpture in a way that is comparable to the recent history of painting. The ability of painting, despite all the opposition, to maintain its relevance within art discourse could also be applied to sculpture, though the discussion has clearly been less defined in this area. Indeed, the potential of sculpture in the classical sense of the word seems exhausted today, and few artists dare to attempt its revitalisation. I assume that Isa Genzken draws inspiration for her novel approach from the fact that sculpture has been consumed by this discussion. The history of the medium is well known, therefore it allows for diverse concepts of sculpture to converge.

Reading Adorno has been a strong influence on the antithetical nature of Genzken's work. The principles of opposition and contradiction do not just feature in individual works but constitute the entire body of work and therefore studying the inconsistencies in her work is more insightful than any attempt to harmonise them. This can be exemplified by looking at the overt change from the ellipsoids and hyperboloids to the subsequent plaster sculptures.

Up to twelve metres long, Genzken's hyperboloids and ellipsoids all stretch into the space horizontally, at least until 1982 when she begins to raise the hyperboloids vertically, bending the wood into less defined shapes. In these sculptures, Genzken achieves an astonishing synthesis and a tense concentration that becomes characteristic of her work from here onwards. The geometric bodies, with their graphic outline, appear like drawings stepping into space; her intense use of strong colours aligns her work with constructivist painting.⁵ Every sculpture describes a space organised by several incisions in a contrasting colour on the surface, creating a complex relationship between outside and inside. Placed directly on the floor, the sculpture is part of the viewer's space and manipulates their movements. Genzken connects minimalism's phenomenological approach to sculpture as a means of perception with the concept of sculpture as a departure from the image. She uses geometric shapes like the minimalists and reflects Carl Andre's horizontality but she extends the discussion by individualising the work. Neither serially nor industrially manufactured, they are single, painterly pieces.

The public success of these works was immediate. Shown in 1979 in the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, Genzken exhibited them again in various important exhibitions, including 'Westkunst' in Cologne in 1981 and a year later at Documenta 7 and the Venice Biennale. Surprisingly, she chose to complete this body of work shortly afterwards and began working on small, amorphic plaster sculptures. These were difficult for the audience to understand, even in retrospect as they are hard to identify as part of her work. The sculptures, conventionally placed on plinths and made from a material no less conventional, seemed the exact opposite of the formally unusual, elegant design of the ellipsoids and hyperboloids with their distinguished use of colour. Moreover, each group of works has a fundamentally different relationship to space.

With the ellipsoids Genzken examined the space by dividing and restructuring it, operating with the movement of the viewer. In comparison her approach to the plaster sculptures is one of the traditional sculptor. The ellipsoids and hyperboloids directly touch the ground though only in one or two almost invisible places, opening the space out with their slender shapes suggesting dynamic movement. In contrast, the plaster sculptures create a distance, demonstrating their independence from the surrounding space, setting up their own little penumbra. Despite their fragile appearance, the missile-like ellipsoids can seem aggressive; like vectors, they point out beyond the space they occupy. The early plaster sculptures juxtapose a mathematical arrangement of the space - the sculpture itself and the space around it - with a logic of productive chance. It is hard to know beforehand what the inside space will look like once the clay model has been torn away. Metal and glass are included and if the handle of the scraper sticks out as well, like in Haus I (1984), a close relationship to montage emerges. The transition from the hyperboloids and ellipsoids to the plaster sculptures is basically a shift from a real space, where the relationship between viewer and sculpture is one-to-one, to the illusionistic space of the model, with its appeals to the imagination. It is illuminating to look at the contrasting working methods of both groups - the ellipsoids are the product of time-consuming precision work, taking three months to complete a single sculpture. Complicated calculations on the computer precede manual execution, which in turn requires careful grinding and polishing. In contrast, working with plaster is a fast process. The material hardens in a few minutes and decisions have to be made quickly, either before or during the modelling. Casting, shaping, belated additions or removals, playing and experimenting with the material, integrating coincidences and objects, allowing inaccuracies - the plaster sculptures enable Isa Genzken to try out what would not be possible in the particular production process of the ellipsoids and hyperboloids. With her contrasting ways of working, Genzken not only tests and reflects her previous work, she also explores a spectrum of sculptural possibilities and polarities and develops her work and her position as an artist within this frame. In comparison to the geometric wood sculptures, which do not reveal their complicated production process, the plaster takes her back to making things with her hands, the simple and direct origin of sculpture. Furthermore she consciously falls back on a material that represents classical sculpture, even though it is normally used as an intermediate stage before casting.

3.
As a material normally used for moulding objects, plaster corresponds with Genzken's more general interest in the proximity of sculpture to real things. None of her sculptures or her other works are purely abstract. They always also refer to a point outside themselves. Windows, hoods and columns are ultimately mimetic representations and, according to Genzken, even the ellipsoids and hyperboloids, relate to sections of the Earth's curvature.

Be it frottages of her studio floor as she used in the oil paintings Basic Research (1988-91), sprayed images using lamps as stencils as in the photogrammes (MLR, 1991), the documentary about her grandparents or the casting process she uses for plaster, concrete or epoxy resin, Isa Genzken is always concerned with moulding, inspecting, photographing and comprehending the real and the conditions that form the reference points of her work. In fact, these works could be called 'readymades', in the widest sense of the word, as Duchamp's concept is certainly one of the defining aspects of her work. However, Genzken uses the concept more freely and relates it to individual objects (though one actual 'readymade' does exist, the Weltempfänger from 1982). She uses duplicating processes like casting or photography to create originals and a second print or cast never exists. She insists on uniqueness in every respect because she is committed to the emancipatory ideas of modernism - while acknowledging the danger of these ideas when applied to mass culture, either in productive or social terms. Conscious of this ambivalence she adheres to the principles of the historical avant-garde but dissolves its absolutism, relating them to and judging them on an individual experience of life. She often uses herself as a measure, with more or less obvious references, for example choosing street names from her childhood as titles for the two concrete windows Sophienterasse and Mittelweg (both 1991), or having her own skull x-rayed (X-Rays, 1988). The cross over of subjective experience and the actual environment is the point of departure for Genzken's investigation of the formal categories of sculpture, beginning with the early wood sculptures via the plaster works to the columns. She examines the possibilities of a visual vocabulary of material, dimension, construction, the principles of support and rest, stability and instability, volume, light and shadow, harmony and contrast, inside and outside, and the different concepts of physical-spatial realisations such as penetration, layering or the dynamics of space. Especially in the large windows and paravents made from concrete or epoxy resin Genzken clearly references constructivism, the other mental starting point for all her work. The combination of both constructivism and the readymade become a mutual corrective in that the formalism that leads to symptoms of disintegration on both sides is avoided.

The wall-based Babies from 1997 are reminiscent of Tatlin's Counter Reliefs, although hers are made out of slightly deformed metallic kitchen utensils. The concrete and epoxy resin windows unite a constructivist aesthetic with the intention to create space without building it and the social implications of the window as part of the architecture. Windows are the link between the inside and outside but at the same time they frame the subjective gaze. The columns made in the past two years also take up an architectural element. Depending on the viewer, they can be seen as models of skyscrapers and, when viewed as a group, they form a miniature city through which we can move. At the same time, she opens up the classical formal language of the columns by adding the most diverse elements; copperplates, perforated metal, mirrors, colour fields and photographs taken in her studio and New York make a sculptural collage where the public and the private realm meet.

The social and aesthetic ideas of modernism that are relevant to Isa Genzken come together most clearly within modernist architecture. And where else than in New York are construction and transparency, tallness and lightness realised in a more impressive way? Genzken not only devotes her most recent photo series to the city, but it has been a foil for her work from the start. A place of differences that can be seen, like her work, as a constant adherence of a critical condition, a system of extended counter-representation, reconsideration and questioning in order to eliminate any danger of one-dimensionality.

— Christiane Schneider