Isa Genzken

Isa Genzken, Paris, New York, installation view, David Zwirner, 29 August - 10 October, 2020.

Isa Genzken is considered one of Germany’s most important and influential contemporary artists. Her diverse practice has encompassed sculpture, photography, found-object installation, film, drawing and painting. Borrowing from the aesthetics of Minimalism, punk culture and assemblage art her work confronts the conditions of human experience in contemporary society and the uneasy social climate of capitalism.

Her inspiration often comes from Modernist architecture and urban landscapes, undermining classical notions of sculpture, and re-creating the architectural dimensions of skyscraper and city streets.

I can relate to this quote about her work ...

"Devoid of the weightiness and overpowering scale seen in the sculptures of her Minimalist predecessors, her work abandons notions of order and power, allowing the viewer to relate to the works’ inherently human qualities of fragility and vulnerability."

https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/2784-isa-genzken/, accessed 1/8/24.

Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948)

Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau, Hanover, 1923-1937.

Kurt Schwitters was an early 20th Century Dada artist who started making collages after the First World War, looking at ways that destruction could inspire creation, and became more than just the collage object itself. It became his whole philosophy and lifestyle that he called merz—a nonsense word that became his kind of personal brand. He was a merz-artist who made merz-paintings and merz-drawings, and naturally, the place where he merzed—his studio and family home—was his merz-building, or Merzbau. Over the years, this Merzbau developed into a kind of abstract walk-in collage composed of grottoes and columns and found objects, ever-shifting and ever-expanding. It was more than just his Hannover studio; it was itself a work of art.

Schwitters had to flee Nazi Germany in 1937 and went to Norway. While he was in exile there his Merzbau in Hanover was destroyed by bombs in 1943, only surviving in photographs that had been taken in 1933. The photographs only go part the way in capturing the Merzbau because it was in a constant state of flux. Never finished and always being added to, or moved around and edited.

The Sprengel Museum in Hannover commissioned a reconstruction of the Merzbau’s main room, made in 1981–83 by Peter Bissegger. Unlike the original Merzbau, it's a static re-imagining of the room based on the photographs and archival writing about the project. But it gives a pretty good idea of what it might have been like.

https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2012/07/09/in-search-of-lost-art-kurt-schwitterss-merzbau/, accessed 12 September 2024.

Sprengel Museum's Merzbau reconstruction.

Constant re-configuration is where my work is finding life. Perhaps I need to make my own merzbau.

Jesse Darling

Jesse Darling at Turner Prize 2023, installation view.

Jesse Darling won the Turner Prize with this installation in 2023. Again, themes of uncertainty and vulnerability.

According to Tate.org "The jury commended his use of materials and commonplace objects like concrete, welded barriers, hazard tape, office files and net curtains, to convey a familiar yet delirious world. Invoking societal breakdown, his presentation unsettles perceived notions of labour, class, Britishness and power."

Responding to its location, the work plays with stereotypes of a British coastal town in a decades-long decline with union jack flags made of tea towels flying over assemblages of metal barriers, red striped tape, lace doilies, and fragmented porcelain dolls that all look on the verge of falling to pieces.

To me this installation presents a transitional moment. The breaking down of order but not to a point of total collapse. The forms seem to be trying to re-establishing themselves into a new way of being, so it feels almost optimistic to me. That's what I want my work to feel like. Yes, there is collapse, but it's always countered with renewal. One can't exist without the other.