Isa Genzken

"There is a permanent misunderstanding regarding the materials I use. I am not interested in readymades. The meaning is in the combination of things. In a time such as the present one, a time when things go to seed, it is important to use cheap materials. People then always say, "Home improvement store." That's complete bullshit. I want to animate the viewers, hold a mirror up to them, yes. It's complicated, but I'll leave it to the art historians to analyze that. I don't just walk into the home improvement store."
Isa Genzken, excerpted from a conversation with Nicolaus Schafhausen in Oil: German Pavilion in Venice 2007.

ACTIVE BACKLIST

ISA GENZKEN: OIL
Edited by Juliane Joan Rebentisch. Text by Vanessa J. Müller, Nicolaus Schafhausen, Liam Gillick.
DUMONT BUCHVERLAG
ISBN: 9783832177973 | US $59.95
Pub Date: 2/28/2010
Active | In stock

ISA GENZKEN: I LOVE NEW YORK, CRAZY CITY
Edited by Beatrix Ruf.
JRP|RINGIER
ISBN: 9783905701098 | US $100.00
Pub Date: 1/15/2006
Active | In stock

ISA GENZKEN: DER SPIEGEL 1989-1991
Artwork by Isa Genzken.
WALTHER KöNIG, KöLN
ISBN: 9783883756455 | US $45.00
Pub Date: 8/2/2003
Active | Awaiting stock

OUT OF PRINT LISTING

ISA GENZKEN: OPEN SESAME
Edited by Iwona Blazwick. Foreword by Kasper Koenig. Text by Yves-Alain Bois, Ulrich Loock.
WALTHER KöNIG
ISBN: 9783865606105 | US $66.00
Pub Date: 8/31/2009
Out of print | Not available

ISA GENZKEN: CATALOGUE RAISONNé 1992-2003
WALTHER KöNIG, KöLN
ISBN: 9783883756882 | US $55.00
Pub Date: 8/2/2003
Out of print | Not available

ISA GENZKEN: SIE SIND MEIN GLUCK
Essays by Diedrich Diederichsen and Rita Kersting, Foreword by Karola Grässlin.
HATJE CANTZ PUBLISHERS
ISBN: 9783775790604 | US $24.95
Pub Date: 1/2/2002
Out of print | Not available

Isa Genzken

In 2007, Isa Genzken took over the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale with her installation, Oil. Featured image is a detail of one of the sculptural works included in the show. According to the Pavilion's curator, Nicolaus Schafhausen, "The ideals of modernism and their re-coding in popular culture, as expressed especially in North American art and everyday culture, undergo a metamorphosis in Genzken's [work], in which splendor and squalor, euphoria and disillusionment are closely intertwined. The American Dream and the American nightmare, observed from a distant and yet emphatic perspective, interweave."

Isa Genzken: Retrospective

Dedicated to Jasper Johns and Myself

Edited by Laura Hoptman, Sabine Breitwieser. Text by Michael Darling, Jeffrey Grove, Lisa Lee, Stephanie Weber.
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Isa Genzken is arguably one of the most important and influential female artists of the past 30 years, yet the breadth of her achievement--which spans sculptures, paintings, photographs, collages, drawings, artist’s books, films, installations and public works--is still largely unknown in the United States. Published in conjunction with the first comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s epically diverse body of work, this publication encompasses Genzken’s work in all media over the past 40 years and is the most complete monograph on the artist available in English. Genzken has been part of the artistic discourse since she began exhibiting in the mid-1970s, but over the last decade a new generation of artists has been inspired by her radical inventiveness. The past ten years have been particularly productive for Genzken, who has created several bodies of work that have redefined assemblage for a new era. The catalogue presents Genzken’s career, through essays exploring the unfolding of her practice from 1973 until today, as well as an expansive plate section that provides a chronological overview of all her most important bodies of work and key exhibitions.
Born in Germany in 1948, Isa Genzken is one of Germany’s most important living artists. In the mid-1970s, as a student at Düsseldorf’s renowned Kunstakademie, she created geometric wood sculptures, which gained her early international acclaim (she exhibited these works at Documenta 7 and the Venice Biennale in 1982). Since then, she has made sculptures in plaster, concrete and epoxy resin. Ranging in size from maquettes to monumental, these abstract works are influenced by Minimalism, but are decidedly narrative. Paintings that examine ideas of surface and light, as well as photographs, collages, artist’s books and films, followed in the 1990s. From the late 90s on, Genzken began to create increasingly complex sculptural installations.

Isa Genzken: Oil

German Pavilion in Venice 2007

Edited by Juliane Joan Rebentisch. Text by Vanessa J. Müller, Nicolaus Schafhausen, Liam Gillick.
Published by DuMont Buchverlag

For more than 30 years, the German artist Isa Genzken (born 1948) has been amassing a body of work in sculpture, installation, photography, collage and film. As one of Germany's brightest stars in the art world, she was well suited to represent her country at the Venice Biennale in 2007, an occasion which this volume commemorates. The title of this book and of her installation at the German pavilion plays with the word's associations as a global and globally contested resource, through a series of sculptural installations invoking in particular America's dependence on oil.

Isa Genzken: Open Sesame

Edited by Iwona Blazwick. Foreword by Kasper Koenig. Text by Yves-Alain Bois, Ulrich Loock.
Published by Walther König

Retrospektive covers more than three decades of Berlin-based Isa Genzken's career, with over 150 images, some of which are published here for the first time. Although she works in a variety of media, Genzken is best known for her architectural sculptures made from colorful materials, including mirrored sheets, fluorescent plastic and glass. A catalogue for Open, Sesame!, Genzken's retrospective exhibition at Cologne's Museum Ludwig and London's Whitechapel Gallery, this volume offers the most definitive look yet at an influential and notoriously reclusive artist. Featured are essays by renowned critic Yves-Alain Bois, curators Ulrich Loocks, Donna De Salvo and Ian White, an interview with Museum Ludwig Director Kasper König and contributions from artists Dan Graham, Wolfgang Tillmans and Lawrence Weiner.

Isa Genzken: I Love New York, Crazy City

Edited by Beatrix Ruf.
Published by JRP|Ringier

New York's public-relations campaign is not likely to add “crazy city” to its already famous heart-icon declaration of love, but few would dispute the truth of noted German sculptor Isa Genzken's extension of it. Only a mind as oriented toward heterogeneity as hers could capture New York in all its insane glory. These three slipcased artist's books from the time Genzken spent in New York a decade ago are published here for the first time. The collection both illuminates the working methods she uses in her sculptures and stands alone as a work of art itself. The books contain, as do her other works, thoughtful if sundry conglomerations of the items that shape our everyday existence from design, advertising and the media. Particularly important to her are the relationships in the urban environment between public and private space, artistic autonomy and collective experience. These explorations, as a window into the mind of this important artist or a window looking out onto the city, will bring repeated enjoyment and insight.

Isa Genzken: Der Spiegel 1989-1991

Artwork by Isa Genzken.
Published by Walther König, Köln

Isa Genzken's Der Spiegel 1989-1991 is a limited-edition artist's book of deceptive simplicity: it consists of 121 reproductions of black-and-white photographs cut out of the influential German newsweekly Der Spiegel over a period of three years. The images are presented starkly, bereft of photo credits or captions: having been freed from their usual meaning-giving context, the images assume a mystery and free-floating universality as the viewer unconsciously struggles to recall the specificity of the sensational news story and headline to which they were once attached. The book is produced in a limited edition of 700 numbered copies.

Isa Genzken: Catalogue Raisonné 1992-2003

Edited by Veit Loers and Beatrix Ruf. Essays by Diedrich Diederichsen, Vanessa Joan Müller and Josef Strau.
Published by Walther König, Köln

In the 25 years since she has been active as an artist, Isa Genzken has created a wide-ranging, multi-faceted body of work. From her inhospitable, ruin-like concrete sculptures to the uncannily fragile and wondrously beautiful New Buildings for Berlin (seen at Documenta11), she has acknowledged modernism as both model and loss. With large-format exhibition pictures, essays, and a detailed catalogue raisonnª.

Isa Genzken: Sie Sind Mein Gluck

Essays by Diedrich Diederichsen and Rita Kersting, Foreword by Karola Grässlin.
Published by Hatje Cantz Publishers

This monograph on the German artist Isa Genzken presents her installation and sculptural work that, for over two decades, has been approaching the border with architecture by considering such issues as the interface between interior and exterior and questions of surface and fragility.