Latergrams from the Isa Genzken Retrospective at MoMA

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Isa Genzkin

“Like Baudelaire said of Daumier in ‘The Painter of Modern Life,’ Isa is the artist of modern life seeing her time and transcending it simultaneously, with no separation.” -nytimes

Seems like Isa Genzkin does not like to give interviews and the interviews I did find were tedious to read (because of the interviewer) but here are some pictures from the Retrospective show at MoMa, which was well-deserved. Her later works are mostly colorful and shiny, made up of toys, plastic, pizza boxes, silver duct tape, strewn beach umbrellas and old airplane windows that come off as desirable trash. But desirable only as art inside the clean walls of MoMA, not in terms of what it evokes of the world. The Coca-Cola beach umbrellas, for instance, reminds of what the beach looks like after a hurricane. In the same installment area is a plugged-in and fucntioning multi-colored rotating disco ball inside of a shopping bag on the floor, and strangely, a gun on top of the table next to the bag. Most of the toy soldiers are also always at war amidst ruins.

“A sculpture must be at least as modern as the most modern hi-fi systems.” – Isa Genzken

Prefabricated, mass-produced stock multiband radio receiver unaltered by the artist, Genzken's only “true readymade.”

Genzken was famous for these concrete constructs, and it is thought that they are suggestive of the wreckage of German cities that followed for many years after the war.

Reappropriations of advertisements.

Slot machine with a photograph of the artist herself on top. Leonardo DiCaprio is also in there.

NOT knitting needles.