On view at the gallery’s Hong Kong location, this will be the first solo presentation of Genzken’s work in Greater China.
The show coincides with the ongoing presentation of the artist’s Rose II (2007) at K11 Musea, Hong
Kong, and her solo exhibition Isa Genzken: Here and Now at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen,
Düsseldorf, Germany.
With a career spanning more than four decades, Genzken has incessantly probed the shifting boundaries
between art, design, architecture, technology, and the individual. Her prodigious oeuvre frequently
incorporates seemingly disparate materials and imagery to create complex, enigmatic works that range
in media, including sculpture, painting, collage, drawing, film, and photography. Deeply attuned to both
the legacies of the twentieth-century avant-garde and the materials and forms of twenty-first-century
global society, Genzken’s work viscerally interrogates the impact of our increasingly commodified and
interconnected culture on our everyday lives.
The exhibition will present key works from the past ten years of Genzken’s career. Among the selection
on view will be an installation of Genzken’s recent “tower” and “column” sculptures. These works stem
from the artist’s decades-long fascination with architecture and urban skylines. At once makeshift and
monumental, these architectonic forms consist of vertical structures of medium-density fiberboard
adorned with mirror foil, spray paint, and other media, complicating the distinctions between surface
and depth, and interior and exterior space. Engaging the architectural and sculptural histories of
modernism, the towers and columns are physically imposing, yet the materials and their human scale
allude to the inherent vulnerability of the modern built environment.
In addition, several freestanding floor sculptures will be on view that belong to Genzken’s Schauspieler
(Actors) series, which debuted as part of her critically acclaimed retrospective organized by The Museum
of Modern Art, New York, in 2013. The series, consisting of elaborately outfitted mannequins holding an
array of props and accessories, signaled a notable shift in Genzken’s practice: with the mannequin
functioning as the sculpture’s base, the artist employs a figurative idiom—making these works her most
explicit engagement with the human form—in contrast to the abstract and geometric modes that
characterized her earlier sculptures.