Isa Genzken valuation
Computer-cut wooden ellipsoids, concrete ruins, and then towers of shop-bought junk.
Isa Genzken was born in Bad Oldesloe in 1948 and studied at Dusseldorf, where she later married Gerhard Richter.
What a work by Isa Genzken is worth
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Bio
Isa Genzken was born in Bad Oldesloe in 1948 and studied at Dusseldorf, where she later married Gerhard Richter. Her early Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos of the late 1970s were extremely long, thin, lacquered wooden forms whose curves were calculated by computer — an unusual thing to do at the time. Through the 1980s and 1990s she made concrete and plaster sculptures resembling fragments of failed modernist architecture on steel supports. From about 2000 the work changed completely into brightly coloured accumulations of mirror, plastic toys, mannequins, spray paint and shopping, assembled into precarious towers.
The three phases behave as separate markets and the works look nothing like each other, which regularly confuses valuations made from photographs alone. The early lacquered wood pieces are scarce. The concrete works are heavy, fragile at the edges and frequently chipped, and losses are common. The assemblages of the 2000s use unstable consumer materials — plastics that yellow, adhesives that fail, printed matter that fades — and their condition and any conservation history are directly relevant. Genzken has also worked substantially in photography and collage.
Rose, Venice and the MoMA retrospective
Genzken's first solo exhibition was at Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf in 1976, and she has shown with Galerie Buchholz in Cologne since 1986 and with David Zwirner since 2010. Rose, an eight-metre stainless-steel flower on the Leipzig fairground, dates from 1993 to 1997, and later versions have stood outside the New Museum and in Zuccotti Park in New York. She represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 2007 with the installation Oil.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York gave her a retrospective in 2013, which travelled to Chicago and Dallas. With Gerhard Richter she designed the König-Heinrich-Platz underground station in Duisburg, completed in 1992. A work's series and date, with its gallery provenance, are the starting points for identifying it.
Hi-Fi, Der Spiegel and Empire/Vampire
Genzken grew up in Bad Oldesloe and Hamburg, studied at the Hamburg art school from 1968 with Almir Mavignier and Kai Sudeck, then in Berlin, and moved to the Düsseldorf academy in 1973, where Katharina Fritsch and Thomas Struth were fellow students; she also read art history and philosophy in Cologne. After graduating in 1977 she taught sculpture at the academy. The photographs of the Hi-Fi series, of 1979, reproduce advertisements for stereo equipment, and in 1990 she set a steel frame, Camera, on the roof of a Brussels gallery to look out over the city.
Der Spiegel 1989-1991 is 121 black-and-white photographs cut from the news magazine, each glued to white card in its own plain frame, and I Love New York, Crazy City, of 1995 and 1996, is a three-volume collage book of souvenirs from her stays there. Empire/Vampire, Who Kills Death, made after the attacks of 11 September 2001, began as more than twenty assemblages of action figures, plastic vessels and consumer debris on pedestals. She has also made films, among them Zwei Frauen im Gefecht in 1974 and Chicago Drive in 1992, and won the Wolfgang Hahn Prize of the Museum Ludwig in 2002.
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