Maybe I have a dark sense of humor or of claustrophobia. Sometimes my work's very shocking, as if something is wounded. But it also has an aspect of tenderness. There are these two energies, balancing back and forth in certain works.
- Rebecca Horn
Since the beginning of the 1970s, Rebecca Horn has been creating an oeuvre which constitutes an ever-growing flow of performances, films, sculptures, spatial installations, drawings and photographs. The essence of their imagery comes out of the tremendous precision of the physical and technical functionality she uses to stage her works each time within a particular space.
Her work is bound together by consistency in logic; each new work appears to develop stringently from the preceding one. Elements may be readdressed, yet appear in totally different, divergent contexts. Following the physical experience of her performance with body extensions, masks and feather objects of the 1970s came the first kinetic sculptures featured in her films such as The Feathered Prison Fan in Der Eintänzer (1978), or The Peacock Machine in La Ferdinanda (1981).