rebecca horn Essay Example

rebecca horn Essay Rebecca Horn was born in 1944 in Germany where she grew up to become one of the most illustrious contemporary German artists of the twentieth-century.She is still currently living and now lives all over the world having homes in New York, Berlin, and London.Her unusual and intense performance pieces have brought her a spot in the art books.In her work, she combines a variety of media: video, performance, installation, and sculpture, which are very characteristic of her style (csw). Horns pieces speak to explore the themes of sexuality, human vulnerability and emotional fragility (artfilm).Her references to the human body and the human soul are reoccurring in many of her pieces.Rebecca Horn is more recognized to bring a fascination with transformation, a loss or failure to attain, a sense of fragility and survival, and the passage of time itself into her performance pieces (Wilkins, Karen).She brings to her works reoccurring references and themes like the eggs, the pendulums, the bird s, the alchemical fluids, the allusions of hermetic transformation, and utopian quest according to Wilkins. Almost all of Rebecca Horns pieces are made from non-art materials, partly of choice and partly of necessity. In her earlier years, Horn became confined to a bed for an extended period after severely damaging her lungs with more traditional art materials in the 1960s.Her use of fiberglass and resins became very harmful to her health, which soon forced to find new ways of working.The experience of her illness and her hospitalization lead her to a new direction which still remains central to Horns art.Because her materials changed she now depends on sophisticated technology and careful engineering, rather than domestic craft, but her obsessions remain the same. Rebecca Horns machine-sculptures speak of energy in the purest state.Her mechanical performance pieces are all mostly electric.The pieces that arent electr