Rebecca Horn (24 March 1944 – 6 September 2024) was a German visual artist best known for her installation art, film directing and body modifications such as Einhorn (Unicorn), a body-suit with a very large horn projecting vertically from the headpiece. While living in Paris and Berlin, she worked in film, sculpture and performance, directing the films Der Eintänzer (1978), La ferdinanda: Sonate für eine Medici-Villa (1982) and Buster's Bedroom (1990).
Early life and education Rebecca Horn was born on 24 March 1944 in Michelstadt, Germany. Horn's grandfather owned a textile factory in nearby Bad König. She was taught to draw by her Romanian governess. Living in Germany after the end of World War II greatly affected the liking she took to drawing. "We could not speak German. Germans were hated. We had to learn French and English. We were always traveling somewhere else, speaking something else. But I had a Romanian governess who taught me how to draw. I did not have to draw in German or French or English. I could just draw." She contracted tuberculosis as a teenager and drew in her hospital bed. Horn studied economics and philosophy initially at university on the advice of her parents, but after six months she decided to study art. In 1963 she attended the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts). In 1964, she had to pull out of art school because she had contracted severe lung inflammation due to fiberglass. "In 1964 I was 20 years old and living in Barcelona, in one of those hotels where you rent rooms by the hour. I was working with glass fibre, without a mask, because nobody said it was dangerous, and I got very sick. For a year I was in a sanatorium. My parents died. I was totally isolated." After leaving the sanatorium Horn began using soft materials, creating sculptures informed by her illness and long convalescence.
Career In 1972 Horn was the youngest participant of the documenta in Kassel. Until 1981, Horn lived in New York. After 1981 she mostly lived in Paris. From 1989 to 2004 she took over a professorship at the Berlin University of the Arts. She retired from teaching in 2009. In 2008 and 2009, she mentored Japanese artist Masanori Handa as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. In 2007, Horn founded the Moontower Foundation in Bad König, which includes a museum and studios. Horn was one of a generation of German artists who came to international prominence in the 1980s. She practiced body art, but worked in different media, including performance art, installation art, sculpture and film. She also wrote poetry. Sometimes her poetry was influenced by her work and sometimes vice-versa. When she returned to the Hamburg academy she continued to make cocoon-like things. She worked with padded body extensions and prosthetic bandages. In the late 1960s she began creating performance art and continued to use bodily extensions.
Body sculpture In 1968 Horn produced her first body sculptures, in which she attached objects and instruments to the human body, taking as her theme the contact between a person and his or her environment. Einhorn (Unicorn) is one of Horn's best known performance pieces: a long horn worn on her head, its title a pun on her name. She presented Einhorn at the 1972 documenta 5. Its subject is a woman who was described by Horn as "very bourgeois", "21 years-old and ready to marry. She is spending her money on new bedroom furniture". She walks through a field and forest on a summer morning wearing only a white horn protruding directly from the front of the top of her head, held there by straps. These straps are almost identical to the ones in Frida Kahlo's painting The Broken Column. The image, with wheat floating around the woman's hips, is simultaneously mythic and modern. Pencil Mask is another body extension piece, made up of six straps running horizontally and three straps running vertically. Where the straps intersect a pencil has been attached. When moving her face back and forth on a near a wall the pencil marks that are made correspond directly with her movements. In 1972 she created Finger Gloves, a performance piece and the main prop of that performance piece. They are worn like gloves, but the finger form extends with balsa wood and cloth. By being able to see what she was touching and the way in which she was touching it, it felt as if her fingers were extended and in her mind the illusion was created that she was actually touching what the extensions were touching. A similar work called "Scratching Both Walls at Once" was part of her 1974 Berlin Exercises series. In this piece, the finger extension gloves she created were longer, measured to specifically fit the performance space. If the chosen participant stood in the middle of the room, they could exactly touch opposing walls simultaneously. Another piece that involves the illusion of feeling with one's hand is Feather Fingers. (1972). A feather is attached to each finger with a metal ring. The hand becomes "as symmetrical (and as sensitive) as a bird's wing". When touching the opposite arm with these feather fingers one can feel the touch on the left arm and of the fingers on the right hand moving as if to touch the left arm, but it is instead the feathers which make contact. Horn described the effect: "It is as if one hand had suddenly become disconnected from the other like two utterly unrelated beings. My sense of touch becomes so disrupted that the different behavior of each hand triggers contradictory sensations." This piece focuses greatly on sensitivity.
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