There is lots of empty space in Isa Genzken’s art, which is odd given her propensity to create visual mayhem and to coax an overflow of detritus into messy collages that describe all manner of ruination. All used up. Nothing there. The end. The idea of empty or blank space as material, as concept, as experience, has been a constant in her work. This productive vacancy lends itself to the uncertainty we all live with, and it permits various readings about the cultures we live in, while owing allegiance to none. Despite the lack of dedication to a discernable social narrative, she situates her inquiries very consistently at the yawning gap between what was and what’s next. Notably, her impulse is not to theorize the ineffable, but to decorate it.
In the late ’80s, Genzken materialized ideas of empty space in a series of small concrete maquettes that approximate architectural ruins. Collectively, the fragmented sculptures engage the debris fields of damaged and destroyed buildings that stretched across post-war Germany, like the ones she grew up around. These early iterations of prefabricated ruins are related to the architectural follies that once proliferated in Europe to delight the Romantic imagination. It was understood that their appearance overshadowed their purpose—they were designed not to inform, but purely for pleasurable longing.
Genzken’s contemporary follies extend from her early sculptures of bombed-out buildings, to her mute "transmission sculptures." Begun in the early ’90s, these boxy, concrete forms, implanted with actual antennae, mimic various types of transistor radios and pose suggestively as relics. In an instant they communicate their inability to communicate and playfully propose some grand dysfunction. They amplify the idea of failure—failure to communicate, failure to receive. At the same time, they are darkly humorous. Plug in any disaster narrative, and it works with these punchy pieces. Genzken’s contemporary ruins epitomize emptiness and abandonment in a very literal way, yet notably without being elegiac. Rather, like everything she produces, they might be seen as opportunistically borrowing from the cultural context in service of an aesthetic which values, above all, being unfashionable and wrong.