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.
In the present work, Rebecca Horn uses a postcard showing Edith Piaf and Jean Cocteau on the film set of ‘Le bel indifférent’ in 1940. Cocteau had written the one-act play ‘Le bel indifférent’ for his friend Edith Piaf.
