Rebecca Horn, Legendary Artist Whose Sculptures Aspired Toward Alchemy, Dies at 80

Rebecca Horn, a venturesome artist whose work explored states of transformation and viewed the body as a portal to other dimensions, died on Saturday at 80. Her New York gallery, Sean Kelly, announced her death, but did not state a cause.

Horn’s mysterious, beguiling work is considered essential in Germany, the country where she was based. There, her art was a staple in exhibitions such as Documenta, the closely watched show that recurs once every five years in Kassel, although her work has also been shown internationally, in venues ranging from the Venice Biennale to New York’s Guggenheim Museum. Today, her influence is visible far and wide, in works ranging from Matthew Barney’s ritual-driven films to Pipilotti Rist’s off-kilter videos with feminist undercurrents.

Her performance-oriented works of the 1960s envisioned new possibilities for women’s bodies, outfitting her participants with appendages that caused them to seem more like animals. Her mechanized sculptures from the decades afterward would further those themes, offering up objects made from metal, liquid, mirrors, and more that seemed not quite human yet not quite inorganic either.

Pieces such as these made it impossible to classify Horn, an artist whose work never expressed its thematic concerns in straightforward ways. Instead, her art spoke a language that could only be felt rather than understood. It tapped into discomfiting psychological states and occasionally even offered a path toward empowerment for her viewers.

Her work was often said to have a ritualistic quality, something she embraced. “Alchemy,” Horn once told the British publication Frieze, “is a visualising process, but in the end it serves to take your consciousness to a higher plane.”

The 1968–72 series “Personal Art” was among Horn’s first significant bodies of work. In these drawings, photographs, and performances, Horn engineered scenarios in which performers were made to don bizarre wearable elements—“body extensions,” as she called them. They variously resembled horns, long nails, feathered plumes, and other, less immediately recognizable things, all in service of finding ways for humans to transcend themselves and become something else altogether.

In the case of Pencil Mask, a 1972 performance documented via video, Horn crafted a fabric contraption lined with pencils that she wore on her face. She then moved repeatedly around a wall, creating scrawls as she did so. This body extension, with its S&M-like overtones, epitomizes the erotic quality of many of Horn’s works. It suggests that people’s bodies exist in space—they literally leave marks on their surroundings—while also channeling a malevolent energy unique to Horn’s oeuvre.

She would go on to eat flowers in the name of performance art, sculpt pianos that disgorged their keys, and create installations that spoke well to the evil that lurked behind every corner in postwar Germany. Never once, however, did her work make for easy viewing.

Curator Germano Celant once wrote in Artforum that Horn’s works were “elaborations of the self, envelopes which give meaning to the fluctuations and pleasures that occur between the self and the outer world. Through them, Horn is reflected.”

Rebecca Horn was born in 1944 in Michelstadt, Germany. From a young age, she developed a fascination with Johann Valentin Andreae, a German theologian who wrote about alchemy during the 15th century, and Raymond Roussel, a 20th-century French poet whose work was formative for many modernists. These figures instilled in Horn a love of all things fantastical—a passion that ultimately caught the eye of Surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim, who would later became a friend to Horn and a supporter of her films early on.

Horn attended the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg between 1964 and 1970. But her studies were interrupted in 1968, when she developed a lung condition as a result of working with certain materials for her sculptures. She then was forced to spend time in a sanatorium, where she took up drawing and sewing.

Once she got out, Horn produced one of her most famous works, Unicorn (1970), for which a female stranger was given a giant horn-like object to wear on her head and made to walk through a field. In a resulting 1973 film of the work known as Performances 2, the woman can be seen rigidly traipsing among tall grass, her breasts bared and her form nearly unrecognizable. “By being turned into a prisoner,” Horn later recalled, “she freed herself inside.”

Horn had a habit of turning viewers into prisoners, too. Die Chinesische Verlobte (The Chinese fiancée, 1977) was a box-like structure that closed once someone entered it. Inside, one could hear audio of two Chinese girls talking to each other. Horn said she wanted viewers to feel contained by the piece.

During the ’80s, Horn’s work grew bigger and more sprawling, and often took the form of installations. For the 1987 edition of Skulptur Projekte Münster, a famed exhibition that situates large-scale sculptures around its titular German city, Horn debuted The Concert in Reverse (1987) in a site where the Gestapo murdered prisoners during World War II. As one traversed this dungeon-turned-penitentiary, one would encounter funnels that dripped water, hammers, and sound elements that Horn called “knocking signals from another world.” Meanwhile, as part of the piece, two live snakes bore witness to it all; they were fed daily with one mouse.

She also made feature films such as 1990’s Buster’s Bedroom, in which Donald Sutherland stars opposite Geraldine Chaplin, daughter of the silent-movie star Charlie Chaplin. The film’s focus is another celebrity of the silent era, Buster Keaton, whom the movie’s female protagonist wants to learn more about. Buster’s Bedroom played at the Cannes Film Festival before being turned into an exhibition that appeared at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles.

Around this time, Horn’s career began to take off in the US. In 1993, she staged a vast exhibition in the rotunda of the Guggenheim, whose glass ceiling was hung with Paradiso (1993), two breast-like objects made of Plexiglas that periodically dripped white liquid below. “Ms. Horn is essentially an astute showman,” the New York Times noted in its review. “She possesses a vaudevillian sense of timing and humor.”

Others seemed to agree. She won the top prizes at Documenta and the Carnegie International, and also received the Praemium Imperiale, an award given out in Japan that at the time came with $169,000. She figured in three editions of the Venice Biennale, including the 2022 one, and received a Haus der Kunst retrospective earlier this year.

Across her various bodies of work, Horn reveled in the notion that she may be successfully able to weird viewers out. “Confusion,” she once said. “I like that.”