Rebecca Horn is an artist who engages intensively with art history and combines and reinterprets motifs, themes, metaphors and symbols in her own cosmos of images.
In particular, the relationship between body and space and the transformation of things and living beings are the major themes of one of the icons of performance and body art. Over the years, her spectrum of artistic means of expression has developed into a complex "Gesamtkunstwerk" of kinetic objects, moving spatial installations and films, often incorporating language, sound and music: ‘It's all connected, I always start with an idea, a story, which develops into a text, which in turn becomes a sketch, then a film, from which the sculptures and installations then emerge.’
In collaboration with the writer Martin Mosebach, various works have been created that consistently express the transmedia principle of her work and the associated linking of the arts. Mosebach wrote the screenplay for her film ‘Buster's Bedroom’ (1990) in which Donald Sutherland and Geraldine Chaplin, among others, played the leading roles. In 2005, the artist's book ‘Das Lamm’ was created in collaboration with Mosebach, with handwritten texts by the writer reproduced as facsimiles and photo paintings by Rebecca Horn.
This work is an original photograph published in Rebecca Horn's artist book ‘Notebook Samarkand 2001’.
The impressions of her journey to Uzbekistan are collected in this book of poems and untitled photographs. Each photograph is dominated by the colours blue and gold, which also appear repeatedly in Horn's poems: ‘People in Samarkand / Their smiles join the sun and gold in blue.’
Each of the photographs was exposed twice, resulting in a superimposition of sky, trees and mosques and the people who inhabit these spheres. This play with perspective captures life in Samarkand with a nostalgic complexity that evokes involuntary memories and daydreams.
The writer Martin Mosebach accompanied Rebecca Horn on her trip to Uzbekistan in search of locations for the film ‘Roussel’, for which Mosebach had written the screenplay and which was ultimately not realised.
