IN MEMORIAM: REBECCA HORN (1944 – 2024)We are deeply saddened by the passing of Rebecca Horn on Friday, 6 September, 2024. With her we lose one of the truly great artists of the 20th century. Together with our founding partner Eric Franck and Galerie Eric Franck of Geneva we have been connected to Rebecca's wonderful career for over 45 years, spanning from the presentatiton of her magnificent Peacock Machine at documenta 7 in 1982 to our exhibition Concert of Sighs that will open in a couple of days.
Rebecca Horn’s Chor der Heuschrecken was the inaugural show of our gallery when it opened in Berlin in 1991, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of her professorship at the University of the Arts in Berlin.
In April of this year, coinciding with her 80th birthday and after several years of dealing with illness, Rebecca opened her extensive exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, a show that is a wonderful achievement to her lifelong achievements.
This Wednesday, when we open her exhibition Concert of Sighs at our gallery, her absence will be will be felt. We will miss her and extend our deepest condolences to her family, friends, and colleagues.
Having studied in Hamburg and London, from 1989, Rebecca Horn herself taught at the University of the Arts in Berlin for almost two decades. In 1972, she was the youngest artist to be invited by curator Harald Szeemann to present her work in documenta 5. Her work was later also included in documenta 6 (1977), 7 (1982) and 9 (1992) as well as in the Venice Biennale (1980; 1986; 1997; 2022), the Sydney Biennale (1982; 1988) and as part of Skulptur Projekte Münster (1987; 1997). Throughout her career she has received numerous awards including Kunstpreis der Böttcherstraße (1979), Arnold-Bode-Preis (1986), Carnegie Prize (1988), Kaiserring der Stadt Goslar (1992), ZKM Karlsruhe Medienkunstpreis (1992), Praemium Imperiale Tokyo (2010), Pour le Mérite for Sciences and the Arts (2016) and, most recently, the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize (2017). A first mid-career retrospective of her work was organized in 1993 by the Guggenheim Museum, New York, traveling to the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Nationalgalerie Berlin, Kunsthalle Wien, Tate Gallery and Serpentine Gallery, London, and the Musée de Grenoble. Further retrospectives were presented at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2005, at Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin in 2006, at Centre Pompidou Metz and simoultaneously at Museum Tinguely in Basel in 2019. On the occasion of her 80th birthday, a retrospective was presented at Haus der Kunst München in 2024.