Rebecca Horn was a German visual artist best known for her installation art, film directing and body modifications such as Einhorn, a body-suit with a very large horn projecting vertically from the headpiece.
27 Facts About Rebecca Horn
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Rebecca Horn was born on 24 March 1944 in Michelstadt, Germany.
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Rebecca Horn's parents were Jewish and the family hid in the Black Forest during her infancy.
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Rebecca Horn was taught to draw by her Romanian governess.
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Rebecca Horn studied economics and philosophy initially at university on the advice of her parents, but after six months she decided to study art.
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In 1972 Rebecca Horn was the youngest participant of the documenta in Kassel.
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In 2007, Rebecca Horn founded the Moontower Foundation in Bad Konig, which includes a museum and studios.
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Rebecca Horn was one of a generation of German artists who came to international prominence in the 1980s.
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Rebecca Horn practiced body art, but worked in different media, including performance art, installation art, sculpture and film.
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Rebecca Horn worked with padded body extensions and prosthetic bandages.
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In 1968 Rebecca Horn produced her first body sculptures, in which she attached objects and instruments to the human body, taking as her theme the contact between a person and his or her environment.
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Einhorn is one of Rebecca Horn's best known performance pieces: a long horn worn on her head, its title a pun on her name.
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Many Rebecca Horn works explore ambiguities in the idea of lenses.
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In what amounted to over ten years of life in New York, Rebecca Horn undertook the production of highly narrative, full-length films, and incorporated the sculptures and movements from her earlier work into this new context of film, transforming their significance.
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Rebecca Horn made her first feature-length film in 1978, Der Eintanzer, about a young man named Max, a blind man and twins.
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Rebecca Horn collaborated with Jannis Kounellis and produced some films, including the film Buster's Bedroom which was shot by the Academy Award-winning Sven Nykvist and stars Donald Sutherland, Geraldine Chaplin and Martin Wuttke.
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When Harald Szeemann invited Rebecca Horn to participate in the 1972 Documenta in Kassel, she was a virtually unknown twenty-eight-year-old artist.
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Rebecca Horn had her first solo exhibition at the Galerie Rene Block, in West Berlin, in 1973.
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Rebecca Horn participated in the Venice Biennale, Skulptur Projekte Munster and the Biennale of Sydney, and was one of very few artists who were selected to participate in Documenta on four occasions.
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Rebecca Horn's solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, "Rebecca Horn: Diving through Buster's Bedroom", featured 18 large-scale mechanized sculptures that related to the themes and content from her feature-length film, Buster's Bedroom.
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Rebecca Horn was honoured with museum exhibitions in Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, New Delhi and Moscow.
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Rebecca Horn lived in Hamburg until 1971, and in London for a brief time.
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Rebecca Horn died in Bad Konig, Hesse, Germany on 6 September 2024, at the age of 80.
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In 1992, Rebecca Horn became the first woman to receive the prestigious Goslarer Kaiserring, and was awarded the Medienkunstpreis Karlsruhe for achievements in technology and art.
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Rebecca Horn was later awarded the 2010 Praemium Imperiale in Sculpture and the Grande Medaille des Arts Plastiques 2011 from the Academie d'Architecture de Paris.
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In 2012, Rebecca Horn received the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art.
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Rebecca Horn was member of the order Pour le Merite.