Isa Genzken is arguably one of the most important and influential female artists of the past 30 years. Genzken's work - which spans sculptures, paintings, photographs, collages, drawings, artist's books, films, installations and public works - has been part of the artistic discourse since she began exhibiting in the mid-1970s, and a new generation of artists has been inspired by her radical inventiveness over the last decade - a period in which she has redefined assemblages. Published to accompany Genzken's first comprehensive retrospective in the USA, this book is the most complete monograph on the artist available in English. It presents Genzken's career in essays exploring the unfolding of her practice from 1973 until today and an illustrated chronological overview of her most important bodies of work and key exhibitions. 0Exhibition: Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA (23.11.2013-10.03.2014) ; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, USA (12.04.-03.08.2014) ; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, USA (14.09.2014-04.01.2015)

A strikingly original analysis of Isa Genzken’s move towards merging sculptural and architectural morphologies into a trailblazing practice of contemporary assemblage. Fuck the Bauhaus, a series of audacious architectural models for future high-rise buildings in Manhattan, marks a poetic and provocative shift in Isa Genzken’s artistic oeuvre. Made in the year 2000, out of quotidian objects and cheap materials foraged in the streets and stores of New York, these sculptural assemblages depart from the German artist’s ‘post-Minimalist’ works begun in the 1970s. The earlier works conjured the haunting spectres of catastrophe, destruction and failed utopia, as well as the potential for freedom amidst the ruins of post-War reconstruction culture. Analysing Genken’s post–2000 penchant for appropriation, collage and montage, André Rottmann draws on the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, Bruno Latour and other theorists of "assemblage," to show how her ‘late style’ is not a return to (neo-)avant-garde traditions but a powerful reimagining of them for the contemporary moment.

"This publication reunites and publishes for the first time the three collage books realized by the artist in New York between 1995 and 1996. The original books, entitled I Love New York, Crazy City, have been photographed to allow the reproduction of each page. The front cover of this publication reproduces the cover of the first original book, and this page the back cover of the third book." --Back cover.

Isa Genzken ? Works from 1973 until 1983 is dedicated to the artist?s early œuvre. The publication opens with works from her time as a student at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts (1973?1977) and details the evolution of her art up to 1983. The works shown include sculptures, computer printouts, extensive series of drawings, photographs and ?lms. The artist blends conceptual approaches with personal themes; many works that initially seem to be exercises in geometric abstraction prove upon closer examination to be traces of her own existence, telling stories of personal relationships and the vagaries of desire. Her work during this period also responds to Minimalism and Conceptual Art, two dominant approaches in America and Western Europe at the time. Essays by Simon Baier, Jutta Koether, and Griselda Pollock examine various aspects of Genzken's body of work.00Exhibition: Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (05.09.2020 - 24.01.2021 / Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany (2021).

This publication, styled as a magazine, presents a new body of work, architectural proposals for Ground Zero, the twenty first centurys most historically significant site. These proposals take the form of architecturally induced sculptures produced in consultation with a specialist team of engineers so that each model can be realised its true architectural scale. Running contrary to official designs, Genzken envisages buildings with a social purpose a church, hospital, car park, disco, memorial and shopping centre. Her proposals draw upon the artists long-standing love affair with Americas breathtaking cityscapes and all pervasive culture. With its glitzy, seductive surfaces, slim rectangular forms and frenetic energy, the work betrays a fascination with the skyscraper. New York represents a vital source of energy that Genzken returns to again and again and which is intrinsically related to what she does: To me New York has a direct link with sculpture. Consisting of brightly coloured fabrics, outdoor parasols, sheet steel, mirror tile, saccharine photographs of animals and a plethora of household chintz, Genzkens output is ultimately precarious: a hedonistic concoction in which clashing elements congregate and collide. For over thirty years she has developed a radically variegated career that refuses to let the viewer know what to expect.

X93;The Only Female Fool” is how Isa Genzken describes herself in the self-chosen title of her exhibition at the Kunsthalle Wien. This statement is typical of the fluid boundaries between deep seriousness and the exuberant, eccentric spirit that pervades her work. Genzken’s artistic practice is characterized by a wide spectrum of media and forms, although her roots in sculpture always remain visible. The exhibition and catalogue focus on specific aspects of her oeuvre, including the mirror motif, the examination of architecture, and space as a social sphere; where early works are juxtaposed with series from later creative periods. Genzken’s collaboration with other artists and her admiration for certain artistic positions is also brought into focus, and selected works by Dan Graham, Gordon Matta-Clark, Jasper Johns, Gerhard Richter, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Lawrence Weiner are presented in dialogue with Genzken’s multilayered work. 00Exhibition: Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (28.05-07.09.2014).

The work of German sculptor Isa Genzken is brilliantly receptive to the ever-shifting conditions of modern life. In this first book devoted to the artist, Lisa Lee reflects on Genzken’s tendency to think across media, attending to sculptures, photographs, drawings, and films from the entire span of her four-decade career, from student projects in the mid-1970s to recent works seen in Genzken’s studio. Through penetrating analyses of individual works as well as archival and interview material from the artist herself, Lee establishes four major themes in Genzken’s oeuvre: embodied perception, architecture and built space, the commodity, and the body. Contextualizing the sculptor’s engagement with fellow artists, such as Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman, Lee situates Genzken within a critical and historical framework that begins in politically fraught 1960s West Germany and extends to the globalized present. Here we see how Genzken tests the relevance of the utopian aspirations and formal innovations of the early twentieth century by submitting them to homage and travesty. Sure to set the standard for future studies of Genzken’s work, Isa Genzken is essential for anyone interested in contemporary art.