A motorised spear turns at the centre of Rebecca Horn’s installation Cutting Through the Past (1992-93), housed at the Castello di Rivoli near Turin. It pierces five wooden doors in a 360-degree motion somewhere between “a caress” and “a surgical cut”, says the museum’s chief curator, Marcella Beccaria. Encapsulating both the German artist’s repertoire of kinetic objects and her interest in memory, the work was a “triggering point” for Castello di Rivoli’s survey of the same name.
This is not only the first major exhibition in Italy to be dedicated to Horn, but the first since her death last September, aged 80. “We felt an urgency to look at the legacy of Rebecca’s work—for the first time without the possibility of counting on Rebecca herself,” Beccaria says.
The show is a co-operation with Munich’s Haus der Kunst, which staged a wide-ranging retrospective of Horn’s six-decade career shortly before she died. That exhibition positioned choreography as a central preoccupation uniting her works—from her pioneering 1970s performances with wearable “body extensions” to the large-scale installations starting in the 90s. “Rebecca Horn shows us how much energy connects us,” says Jana Baumann, the senior curator at Haus der Kunst. “Immediately after installing in Munich, we could really deeply feel what the work does with you in the space.”
Protean and prolific, Horn’s work calls for “a sharp, precise approach” to curation, Baumann says. And at Castello di Rivoli, Beccaria promises a “very specific view” that will focus on the spiritual concerns of Horn’s lesser known later works, and on drawing as a “continuum” underpinning her practice from the 1960s onward. A group of early drawings depict the female body as a locus of energy, an idea that “explodes” in the late Bodylandscapes drawings from the 2000s and 2010s, Beccaria says.
Time and tension
The imprint of Horn’s experience of illness and isolation in her 20s—when she spent a year in a sanatorium—can be seen in the early performance videos that will make up the heart of the exhibition. Films such as Der Eintänzer (the dancer, 1978) have a “specific grammar” concerned with the slow passage of time and the tension “between being confined and seeking freedom”, Beccaria says.
The exhibition will also explore the recurring motif of circles, from the “protective” imagery of fan-like wings and feathered cocoons in the 1970s performances and films, to the late drawings, where their radius corresponds to the span of the artist’s arms. “They have a very strong spiritual connotation,” Beccaria says. The show will culminate in the sculpture Das Rad der Zeit (the wheel of time, 2016), which refers to the Buddhist concept of existence as an endless cycle.
Circularity will be woven into the design of the exhibition itself. Horn’s works will occupy the Manica Lunga, the narrow, corridor-like wing of Castello di Rivoli. The architecture “obliges viewers to move in one direction”, Beccaria explains, before turning and retracing their steps.
• Rebecca Horn: Cutting Through the Past, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin, 23 May-21 September
