Isa Genzken: Retrospective

Organized by The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Isa Genzken: Retrospectivewas the artist’s first retrospective exhibition at an American museum. Featuring around 150 works, many of which were on view in the United States for the first time, the show covered forty years of Genzken’s practice in diverse media. The exhibition was curated by Sabine Breitwieser and Laura Hoptman at MoMA in collaboration with curators at the museums to which the show traveled in 2014—Michael Darling at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Jeffrey Grove at the Dallas Museum of Art.

As critical responses to the exhibition emphasized, New York has long been an important source of inspiration and material for the artist, who first came to the city in 1960; the exhibition included the workI Love New York, Crazy City (1995–1996), a three-volume scrapbook of architectural photographs, maps, hotel bills, receipts, flyers, and other souvenirs that Genzken began composing during a stay of several months. As Roberta Smith notes in a review of the show for The New York Times, "It is hard to imagine her work without the city’s skyscrapers, street life, trash and style, not to mention Canal Street and its rich vein of cheap shiny materials and job lots. . . . In the galleries, the works move in roughly chronological fashion, in distinct, often startling series, presenting an artist who seems to become younger and more vital with each decade, as her work becomes more spontaneous and grounded in reality."

For Peter Schjeldahl, writing in The New Yorker, "The show finds coherence in works that range from minimalist sculpture, charged with cryptic emotions, from the nineteen-seventies, to recent hilarious assemblages, featuring plastic toys and gussied-up mannequins, which secrete a steely aesthetic discipline. Unifying it all is a brash spirit that is strangely both celebratory and bedevilled. Genzken takes on the ideals of modern art and architecture along with the joys and the anxieties of life in contemporary cities."

A major catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition features texts by Sabine Breitwieser, Michael Darling, Jeffrey Grove, Laura Hoptman, Lisa Lee, and Stephanie Weber.