Activities, exhibitions and projects

Es Baluard Museu d'Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma presents «Gabinet. Rebecca Horn», an exhibition that reviews the audiovisual works of the artist Rebecca Horn from an approach to her creations linked to the image in motion since the early seventies. The exhibition can be visited in the Gabinet of the museum from March 23 to October 14, 2018. 

The review of the artist's work, which includes video recordings of artistic performances and two films, alludes to a language of its own that brings us closer to different metaphysical references, allusions to sex, desire, the body, as well as the intuitive and the scientific, together with his particular way of including poetic and literary references as a constant in his works.         

The German artist, with a particular link with Mallorca, where she has her second home, has worked inspired by North American underground cinema and audiovisual exploration, thus presenting literary references in her works to Kafka, Joyce and Faulkner, to the Generation beat, TS Eliot and Sylvia Plath, based on revisited classics and her own texts.

The use of mechanical elements, hitherto-unpublished and fragile materials in her installations, and the transdisciplinarity of her language has led her to collaborate with artists like Jannis Kounellis, Sven Nykvist, with the actors Donald Sutherland, Geraldine Chaplin and Martin Wuttke, and with the German writer Martin Mosebach or the musician Hayden Chisholm.

Rebecca Horn, (Michelstadt, 1944), a German artist present in the Es Baluard collection through two works, Three Graces in Blue, 1993 and La Ferdinanda X-Ray, 1981, is a visual creator with a lengthy career in the development of installations with links to technology, interactive performances and film production.

She made her first film in 1970, a short lasting 12 minute, based on the performance Einhorn(Unicorn), the sculpture for which now forms part of the collection of the Tate Modern in London. In general, her work is characterised by a convergence of performances, films, sculptures and spatial installations, drawings, photographs and a special treatment of the sound-related and the relationship of bodies in space.

Along this period she used prosthetic accessories and extensions in her performances which she then turned into films, representations in which she explored this equilibrium between body and space which then evolved, and would give rise to an interaction between her mechanical sculptures where the actors perform the role of dysfunctional machines. Their parts would evolve based on the idea of defining and cutting distances using reflections of mirrors, light and sound, including her characteristic allusions to the impossibility of movement, lack of communication and the relationship with things spatial as a metaphor.

Horn conceived her first full-length film in 1978, Der Eintänzer (The Gigolo), and it was followed by La Ferdinanda: Sonate für eine Medici-Villa (La Ferdinanda: Sonata for a Medicci Villa), 1981 and Buster’s Bedroom, 1990; these are very narrative-based films in which the artist’s obsession with the imperfection of the body and the balance between the figure and objects become patently clear.

Likewise, in 2016 a selection of this project could be seen at the Tate Modern in London. For Es Baluard, the museum's director, Nekane Aramburu, has made an adaptation that enhances the review of this author from the Gabinet, a space linked to the works of the museum's collection.