Rebecca Horn: Glowing Core
La Llotja, Palma de Mallorca
March 28 – October 1, 2015
Glowing Core, a new site-specific installation, by Rebecca Horn is on view at La Llotja, Palma de Mallorca, Spain from March 28 through October 1, 2015. A major publication accompanying the exhibition will be published in four languages in May 2015. The catalogue will include texts by famous poets and writers including Iso Camartin, musician Hayden Chisholm, José Oliver, and Joachim Sartorius, who wrote the following essay about the exhibition:
MEASURING THE SKY FROM THE DEPTHS OF A WELL
Joachim Sartorius
Rebecca Horn’s art presents us with a succession of unsettling allegories of human existence. One of the most versatile and inventive artists of our time, she works across a range of media, including sculpture, installation, performance, painting, film and poetry. Over the last four decades she has produced a highly complex oeuvre that is grounded in and bound together by an ongoing meditation on metaphysical issues and a deep existential desire.
It is the desire to fathom the nature of man, his powers of perception, his capacity for suffering and his ways of dealing with beauty, death and mourning. By sharpening our senses, Rebecca Horn teaches us who we are. Even in her earliest works, this desire to comprehend mankind is accompanied by a world-related longing – a yearning to push the boundaries of experience, to extend one’s own being, one’s own body, to the point where it brushes up against the world and the cosmos. The central installation in La Llotja unites these borderline experiences in a captivatingly beautiful sculpture. Peering down into the rotating floor mirrors, viewers feel as if they are falling almost 20 metres into the depths of a well shaft. Looking up, they are swept up in a vortex towards a blue light. Man stands between heaven and earth: here, the fall into the bottomless chasm; there – in the updraft of swirling light – the ascension.
This vertical sculpture, rising from inside the earth up to the golden blue of the firmament, is surrounded by sixteen sculptures that create a horizontal plane of a human scale which continues and modifies the interaction of opposing forces: vulnerability and harmony, threat and resurrection. Set behind golden basins filled with water, these sculptural signs with their human dimensions reveal the self in the mirror and cast flecks of light like wandering souls around the high vaulted space. These sculptures are each crowned by a skull: the cast-iron model of one of the capuzzelle (‘little heads’) Rebecca Horn came across in the catacombs of San Gaudioso in Naples while conducting research for her installation Spiriti di Madreperla. In late 2002, 333 of these skulls pushed their way through the paving stones of the Piazza del Plebiscito, linking the world of the dead and their ritualistic veneration to the 77 shimmering mother-of-pearl halos that hovered above the square in the midnight-blue sky. The capuzzelle have accompanied Rebecca Horn for many years and to many different locations – Berlin, New Delhi, Maribor and Moscow. The installation here in La Llotja is the culmination of this long journey, over the course of which the capuzzelle have evolved into beings – symbols not only of our individual confrontation with death, but also of a life- extending force, as protecting spirits similar to a wall around the earth’s glowing core. This impression of a protective barrier is emphasised by the attributes of the sculptures – the golden antennas and prickly pear cacti that exude an exemplary spirit of defiance with their spiky forms.
If there are three features which are particularly characteristic of Rebecca Horn’s art – the interaction with the place in which it is situated, the auratic space it generates through dialogue with the viewer, and the reuse of sculptural objects as part of an almost alchemical process – here in La Llotja in Palma, all three of these are implemented in an artistic idiom that is both highly distinctive and truly memorable. What are we – we who feed on great mysteries – without the dead? The intersection of vertical and horizontal lines, combined with the rotating mirrors in the centre and the revolving mirrors in front of the skulls, create a magical space of sacred beauty that captures the notion of salvation in a flitting yet beguilingly complex image.