Rebecca Horn, by Extension
Exploring the physical and psychological reach of the artist across multiple formats and beyond the corporeal…
Artist Rebecca Horn was born at a turning point in history, beginning life avoiding Nazi cleanup squads during the last year of the Second World War. In the aftermath, she and her Jewish family moved regularly and she was discouraged from speaking German, learning English and French but developing a preference for drawing as a more honest mode of communication instead of speech.
As a teenager, she took to drawing as a recuperative therapy whilst recovering from a bout of tuberculosis, yet despite her clear capacity for visual expression, her parents insisted she attend a series of boarding schools and study for a career in business… until she forged her own path by enrolling at Hamburg’s University of Fine Arts in 1963. Right from the start, self-expression through art had been an act of rebellion for her.
Some of her early sculptural experiments were to affect Horn deeply, both physically and psychologically, in unexpected ways. In 1964, she suffered more severe lung scarring caused by toxic fumes from chemicals she was using in fibreglass and polyester moulding. Weak and effectively immobile, she spent another year in a sanitarium becoming painfully aware of her…
