Rebecca Horn
Untitled, 1963
mixed media on paper
paper: 15 3/4 x 14 3/16 inches (40 x 36 cm)
framed: 34 1/4 x 26 3/8 inches (87 x 67 cm)
RH-3017
Sean Kelly is delighted to announce Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015, a major exhibition featuring fifty years of drawing by Rebecca Horn. This historical presentation, which includes rarely seen works on paper, will open in the New York gallery in January before traveling to Sean Kelly, Los Angeles in March, two cities in which Horn lived and for which she has a strong affinity. Horn’s first exhibition with the gallery in nine years, this significant survey will be the first opportunity for visitors to see many of these critically important works, most of which have never been shown in the United States. The occasion also marks the thirty-four-year professional relationship between Rebecca Horn and Sean Kelly.
Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015 is, I believe, a remarkable exhibition, that has deep meaning for me both artistically, and personally. Prior to moving to America and opening an art gallery, I was Director of Art for the Bath International Festival, in Britain. In 1988, I invited Rebecca Horn to make an exhibition of new site-specific work to be installed throughout the city. Characteristically, it was for Rebecca an extremely ambitious and memorable exhibition. Working so closely with Rebecca at that time completely changed the way I understood how to work with artists and indeed how to install art; I learnt a great deal and owe her an enormous debt. Over the ensuing 34 years, we have made many exhibitions together at venues worldwide, and this is her ninth presentation at the gallery. It has been a privilege to work alongside this remarkable artist for so many years, someone I am honored to call a friend. We are delighted to present this historic exhibition of her drawings, a medium that was always central to her practice. The exhibition will travel from New York to our Los Angeles gallery—two cities Rebecca lived in at various times in her life—and will bring necessary focus to this important aspect of her oeuvre.
-Sean Kelly, January 2023
This extraordinary exhibition, which includes 55 works on paper, is the first dedicated exclusively to this aspect of Rebecca Horn’s practice, and the most extensive presentation of her work in the United States since her major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1993, curated by Germano Celant.
The earliest works in the exhibition, dating from the mid-1960s, evince Horn’s concern with the human form, bodily appendages, states of transformation, mechanization, and machinery, making evident her dedication to the aesthetic form of performance.
From her earliest stages as an artist, drawing has been foundational and informed every aspect of Horn’s multi-faceted oeuvre, ranging from performances, which utilize bodily extensions, to feature films, poems, dynamic sculptures, and site-specific installations.
In 1968, Horn was hospitalized for a debilitating lung condition brought on by certain sculptural materials she was using. A subsequent period of convalescence at a sanitorium inspired a series of sculptures concerned with the body, isolation, and physical vulnerability.
The transformation of the experience; that is pure art. - Rebecca Horn
These themes became the artist’s subject, and her proposals for sculptures are documented in these early drawings. Other works, from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, demonstrate the myriad approaches Horn has taken to the form, with each cycle of drawings having a distinct tempo, like the cadence of the poetry or rhythm of the music that have continuously inspired her.
Throughout her career, drawing has occupied a central role, with Horn working serially at different moments to create specific bodies of work, ranging from smaller, more intimate pieces to the later, large Bodylandscape works on paper.
For her smaller drawings, Horn often worked simultaneously across multiple sheets of paper laid out before her, adding marks and details as she moved delicately and quickly, fluttering across the paper’s surface like a butterfly, touching down on each sheet at various intervals to make her marks.
From around 2003-2015, Horn produced an impressive group of large-scale works referred to as Bodylandscape, paintings on paper that extended her interest in the body as machine into an autobiographical, performative arena. Incorporating pencil, acrylic, and watercolor and gouache with text, these energetic works are scaled to the artist’s own proportions, defined by the limit to which her arms could extend when building the sometimes-frenzied compositions through the movements and actions of her own body.
Horn’s progression from attaching performative apparatus to her body in her early work, to creating mark producing automatons and sculptural machines, is synthesized in these stunning works, which replace the replicant machine with the body of the artist, bringing the arc of her career full circle. In 2015, Horn suffered a devastating stroke, which sadly left her unable to continue making drawings, resulting in these psychologically charged works being among the final and finest works on paper that she produced.
Installation view of Rebecca Horn: Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015 at Sean Kelly, New York, January 7 - February 18, 2023, Photography: Jason Wyche, New York, Courtesy: Sean Kelly
Installation view of Rebecca Horn: Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015 at Sean Kelly, New York, January 7 - February 18, 2023, Photography: Jason Wyche, New York, Courtesy: Sean Kelly
Installation view of Rebecca Horn: Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015 at Sean Kelly, New York, January 7 - February 18, 2023, Photography: Jason Wyche, New York, Courtesy: Sean Kelly
Installation view of Rebecca Horn: Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015 at Sean Kelly, New York, January 7 - February 18, 2023, Photography: Jason Wyche, New York, Courtesy: Sean Kelly
Installation view of Rebecca Horn: Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015 at Sean Kelly, New York, January 7 - February 18, 2023, Photography: Jason Wyche, New York, Courtesy: Sean Kelly
Installation view of Rebecca Horn: Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015 at Sean Kelly, New York, January 7 - February 18, 2023, Photography: Jason Wyche, New York, Courtesy: Sean Kelly
Installation view of Rebecca Horn: Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015 at Sean Kelly, New York, January 7 - February 18, 2023, Photography: Jason Wyche, New York, Courtesy: Sean Kelly
Installation view of Rebecca Horn: Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015 at Sean Kelly, New York, January 7 - February 18, 2023, Photography: Jason Wyche, New York, Courtesy: Sean Kelly
Installation view of Rebecca Horn: Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015 at Sean Kelly, New York, January 7 - February 18, 2023, Photography: Jason Wyche, New York, Courtesy: Sean Kelly
Installation view of Rebecca Horn: Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015 at Sean Kelly, New York, January 7 - February 18, 2023, Photography: Jason Wyche, New York, Courtesy: Sean Kelly
Installation view of Rebecca Horn: Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015 at Sean Kelly, New York, January 7 - February 18, 2023, Photography: Jason Wyche, New York, Courtesy: Sean Kelly
Installation view of Rebecca Horn: Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015 at Sean Kelly, New York, January 7 - February 18, 2023, Photography: Jason Wyche, New York, Courtesy: Sean Kelly
Installation view of Rebecca Horn: Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015 at Sean Kelly, New York, January 7 - February 18, 2023, Photography: Jason Wyche, New York, Courtesy: Sean Kelly
Installation view of Rebecca Horn: Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015 at Sean Kelly, New York, January 7 - February 18, 2023, Photography: Jason Wyche, New York, Courtesy: Sean Kelly
Installation view of Rebecca Horn: Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015 at Sean Kelly, New York, January 7 - February 18, 2023, Photography: Jason Wyche, New York, Courtesy: Sean Kelly
Installation view of Rebecca Horn: Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015 at Sean Kelly, New York, January 7 - February 18, 2023, Photography: Jason Wyche, New York, Courtesy: Sean Kelly
Installation view of Rebecca Horn: Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015 at Sean Kelly, New York, January 7 - February 18, 2023, Photography: Jason Wyche, New York, Courtesy: Sean Kelly
Installation view of Rebecca Horn: Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015 at Sean Kelly, New York, January 7 - February 18, 2023, Photography: Jason Wyche, New York, Courtesy: Sean Kelly
Installation view of Rebecca Horn: Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015 at Sean Kelly, New York, January 7 - February 18, 2023, Photography: Jason Wyche, New York, Courtesy: Sean Kelly
Installation view of Rebecca Horn: Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015 at Sean Kelly, New York, January 7 - February 18, 2023, Photography: Jason Wyche, New York, Courtesy: Sean Kelly
Installation view of Rebecca Horn: Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015 at Sean Kelly, New York, January 7 - February 18, 2023, Photography: Jason Wyche, New York, Courtesy: Sean Kelly
