Isa Genzken (b.1948, Bad Oldesloe, Germany) is one of the most respected artists of her generation.
Her art work is concerned with architecture and the urban environment, especially the pared-down style of design from the mid 20th century that came to signify certain political and social ideologies. She brings together paintings and sculptures combining photography, painting and architecture.
Genzken lives and works in Berlin. She has exhibited widely throughout Europe and the US. Sport bought together paintings and sculptures combining photography, painting and architecture which have been specifically selected for this exhibition at Camden Arts Centre. The paintings of suspended hoops, collectively entitled MLR (More Light Research) (1992), recall gymnastics apparatus caught mid-swing and frozen in time. Sprayed and laminated on canvas, these large-scale pixelated images appear like photo-grams with the hoops’ actual size accentuating the feeling of a recently departed presence, a ghostly residue of the moment after a fall.
Beach huts (Strandhäuser zum Umzeihen, 2000), in contrast, is a series of ten sculptures constructed from collage photography and painting. Each is a playful representation of what these idiosyncratic structures mean. The apotheosis of her ongoing concerns with architecture, their outside surfaces seem to suggest what might be going on within, behind closed doors even; an extension of the positive and negative in photography, evoking metaphors of dark and light, of interior, private worlds made public.
