Isa Genzken Paintings at the Saatchi Gallery

Isa Genzken’s assemblages create suggestive space. Plinths stand as neutral development zones for spontaneous construction; anonymous towers exuding power and autonomy become laden with the intrinsically personal. In Mutter mit Kind, Genzken’s minimalist box is both domestic interior, and psychological projection. Incorporating furniture, children’s toys, and a Madonna-like image, Mutter mit Kind poses as a disrupted altar, exuding a sinister element of vulnerability and instability. The upturned chair on top doubles as a looking-glass, giving magical distortion to the fairytale figures within.Isa Genzken’s installation becomes simultaneously painterly and architectural: her giant mirror plates like translucent building facades, encapsulating reflections of the gallery interior within their chaotic framework. Highlighting this illusion between flat and perceived space, Genzken collages her glass planes with pages torn from books, bands of tape, and dripping paint, creating a sense of weightlessness in their layered materiality. Repetitive grids, greasy lines, and candy coloured bars, become entangled as urban decay, devouring antiquarian images in its graffiti-like debasement. Titled Kinder Filmen 1, Genzken’s installation suggests information overload broadcast as disrupted transmission, her formalist excess presenting a break down of innocence.
Isa Genzken as a traditional sculptor, along with the usual remarks concerning the heterogeneity of her method and the surprising breaks between her various bodies of work, belong firmly to the topoi of her reception. Genzken's approach, which includes recourse to photography, video, film, collages, and collage books, does, it's true, represent a continuous examination of the classic themes of sculpture: the ordering of masses and volumes; the relations between construction, surface design, and materials; the conception of and relation between objects, space, and the viewer.Her work concentrates on the ways in which the reality that surrounds and shapes us operate: architecture, design, advertising, media, socio- political themes and fields of tension linked with them, tensions between private and public, permeable and hermetic, subjective and objective.Genzken always formulates the work of art as an autonomous unit. It cannot become a mere object, and certainly not an escapist object, because it confronts us with individuality, but also with subjectivity and even intimacy, as realities. Thus the relationships, conditions and effects that make up our view of the art object itself, our view of general and social reality, are open to question.Genzken’s work straddles the spheres of formalist purity and narrative interpretation. Entrenched in the process of making, Genzken’s work is the result of her own intimate interaction with materials, tempering the procedure of formal decision-making with the spontaneity of imaginative play.