On the fourth floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art right now stands a phalanx of mannequins sporting plaid button-downs, tinfoil bandeaux, flower leis, ski caps and cowboy hats, designer jeans, velvet tailcoats and many less easily identifiable accessories. Immense, mysterious wooden tools lie prone near neatly framed advertisements for hi-tech stereos. Clunky-yet-sensitive concrete radios huddle together while X-rays of a skull lifting a glass of wine to its missing lips hover close by. Hauntingly elegant resin and steel windows frame distant views of a miniature city risen from plywood, neon plexiglas, pizza boxes, shredded tin cans and red duct tape. Spray-painted airplane parts line the walls and life-size astronaut dolls hang overhead. Suitcases, decorated with photos of cute animals, go nowhere.
Despite appearances, this is not a group show surveying the last 40 years of artistic practice, minus a few isms. It is a deeply overdue career retrospective for the German artist Isa Genzken, who was born in 1948 near Hamburg and has lived in Berlin for the past two decades, ever since it became the center of the German art world. The MCA show, organized jointly with the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Dallas Museum of Art, is the first major consideration of her work in a U.S. museum. Despite some baffling curatorial decisions—sculptures installed so close to the wall they can't be seen in full, stanchions so distracting they seem like sculptural interventions—it promises to be hugely influential among Chicago's young artists. Many will not have had the chance to see much if any of Genzken's work in person before. Most will be startled by the permissiveness and gutsiness of her sprawling, anything-goes career.
Rare is the creator who has kept pace with art world trends—or better yet, outpaced them—for 40-plus years, radiating electrifying energy and total commitment from then until now. Recent sculptures, assembled from off-the-shelf junk and tapped in to a dizzying combination of terrorism and consumerism, feel almost shockingly of the moment, politically and artistically. Tenderly empty concrete pavilions, set atop tall steel tables some two and a half decades ago, reproduced a postwar German landscape at its moment of transformation. Before came strange, sleekly enormous objects, calculated by computer but crafted by hand, riding an edgy wave between technological advance and its opposite. In between Genzken has dabbled in nearly everything else, save perhaps for social practice and the trend of outsourcing production to an army of assistants. She has always made everything herself and continues to do so.
The fearless breadth and inexhaustible zeal of this motley output thrills. It can also be dizzying and strange. Genzken has clearly never been one to just stick with what's expected or what sells. She has never stopped experimenting with materials and forms. She makes a mess and appears immune to the fear of failure. Indeed, not all of the work on view at the MCA is great, or will seem so to any one person. There are flops here alongside the knockouts — though viewers may have trouble agreeing on which is which.
I myself am partial to Genzken's architectural meditations, be they concerned with the hulking fragments of war-torn Germany, the elegant severity of international modernism, or the postmodern gaudiness of contemporary New York. Someone else—though not me—is sure to dig her idiosyncratically hip mannequins and a foppish, melodramatic comedy made in collaboration with friend and fellow artist Kai Althoff.
Very real differences exist between Genzken's earlier work and everything she's done since. The shift seems to have occurred in the mid-90s, around the time of her split from the preeminent German painter Gerhard Richter, her move to Berlin and her introduction to a younger set of artists. It's hard to miss. Genzken went from producing elegant minimal forms to throwing rowdy maximal installations. She stopped carving sculptures out of raw material like wood and resin and began to piece them together them from bric-a-brac. Her politics changed from being subtle—the way a rough, concrete shell with rosy insides hints at a heartbroken landscape—to hitting the viewer over the head with dripping red paint, photos of lower Manhattan covered in dust, and titles like "Oil XI." Then again, World War II was over before Genzken was born. September 11 happened while she was visiting New York.
Nevertheless, certain themes have persisted in her work for all 40-odd years of it. The city and its architecture form a continuous backdrop and even foreground. Chicago plays a cameo role with a John Hancock tower sculpture and a road trip movie, but it's New York and Berlin that are clearly Genzken's most beloved towns. Despite this affection, or perhaps because of it, their destruction is deeply felt. So is their life, nowhere more vividly described than in scrapbooks made while Genzken was on an extended hiatus in New York in the 1990s. These books collapse a portrait of the irrepressible artist with a portrait of the irrepressible city.
This unlikely collision of architecture and portraiture recurs in a group of pillars patched together from shiny panels of mirror, veneer and mesh, and named for some of Genzken's best friends. She named one for herself as well, and really it is Genzken who persistently pops up throughout the show, cutting an impish figure while posing for her own exhibition posters, dressing mannequins in her own clothing, starring in her own films, and even inscribing the catalogue to herself.
And why not? Few artists have displayed as much moxie and versatility as Isa Genzken, nor sustained as vast and exciting a career. If she wants to dedicate her work to herself, she's more than earned the right. Not that she would care.