Rebecca Horn’sConcert of Sighsfills the space of Galerie Thomas Schulte, withthe echoes muted whispers, which emanate from coiled copper trumpets juttingout of rubble. Piled on the floor are building pallets, wall fragments, and woodenboards, lay strewn in piles on the floor from which thin copper tubes wind likeplant shoots, ending in funnel-like trumpet mouths. The artist used buildingmaterials from the ruins of Venetian houses for her installation, which wasoriginally created for the 1997 Venice Biennale. Whispers and sighs seep throughthe individual funnel trumpets, as if offering a mouthpiece to the life beneaththe ruins, or as if the crumbling walls of Venice were telling us their story. Thesedelicate, yet haunting sounds, make the skin crawl, as the voices, audible inseveral languages, lament their suffering. As viewers, we do not merely hearthe “concert of sighs”, we feel it as a physical and visceral experience. Thiswork serves as a further testament to Horn’s mastery of sensory orchestrating:enveloping all our senses from balance to touch as the echoing sighs seep throughour skin.As we stand closer to the work, we feel its innate fragility; fearing that atany moment, a piece could fall, slip, and crush the copper pipes from which thesounds flow. Through our sense of balance, our bodies resonate with RebeccaHorn’s installation. On the one hand, we embark on a journey to Venice; on theother, we are confronted with a more wholistic sense of chaos and destruction.Thus, it is its inherent multisensory power that makes theConcert of Sighssosignificant. The work challenges our sense of balance, the solidness of the groundbeneath our feet, and indeed, our sense of existential security. For RebeccaHorn, the body becomes a sensory commune in which the sense of touch—notsight—is the starting point and basis of a multisensory experience. The artistunderstands that touch encompasses the entire body and thus interacts with ourother senses. We do not literally have to touch her works to see them embodied.It is a physically and emotionally activated perception that involves not onlythe touch of the hand, but the entire repertoire of the body’s materiality and itssomatosensory experiences. It also draws on our depth sensitivity, pushing usto consider the position and dynamics of our bodies in space.As recent research in neuroaesthetics shows, hearing is also a specializedform of tactile perception that is limited to a specific area of the body. In thisway, we learn and take in information through each sensory experience, whichgoes beyond our cognitive or psychological forms of knowledge production.When we listen to the sighs, when we see and feel the elements of the dilapidatedVenetian houses, we gain an embodied wisdom and experience that the artistis sharing with us. One which transports us beyond the decays of Venice, butwhich confronts us with our own contemporary world, regardless of the city welive in. This stands in contrast to Marco Polo’s character in Italo Calvino’s novelThe Invisible Cities, who—no matter what city he was talking about—alwaystold the story of Venice. What Rebecca Horn and Marco Polo have in common,on the other hand, is aptly stated by the Great Khan in Calvino’s same novel:“Admit what you are smuggling: states of mind, states of grace, elegies!”

AlongsideConcert of Sighs,stand two works,Raven’s ChoiceandSchlupfloch,which, in Horn’s similarly characteristic style, introduce a sensual lightness, asense of humor and even erotic tone, which call up images of hair tickling ourskin and pushing us to ask, where do sighs truly originate from?Rebecca Horn composes a polyphony of senses—a visceral and physicalexperience opening at Galerie Thomas Schulte.

Text by Dr. Marta SmolińskaTranslation by Dr. Leonie Schulte

Shortly before the opening of the exhibitionConcert of Sighs, Rebecca Hornpassed away on 6 September, 2024 at the age of 80.3Rebecca Horn (born 1944 in Michelstadt, died in 2024 in Bad König, Hesse,Germany) since the early 1970s developed an autonomous, internationallyrenowned position beyond all conceptual, minimalist trends. Her work rangesfrom sculptural environments, installations, drawings, paintings to videoand performance and manifests abundance, theatricality, sensuality, poetry,feminism, and body art. While it was mainly through her early performancesthat she explored the relationship between body and space, in her later work,the human body was replaced by kinetic sculptures. The element of physicaldanger that comes from machines, knives, and electricity is a constant themethroughout the artist’s work.Having studied in Hamburg and London, from 1989, Rebecca Hornherself taught at the University of the Arts in Berlin for almost two decades.In 1972, she was the youngest artist to be invited by curator Harald Szeemannto present her work in documenta 5. Her work was later also included indocumenta 6 (1977), 7 (1982) and 9 (1992) as well as in the Venice Biennale(1980; 1986; 1997; 2022), the Sydney Biennale (1982; 1988) and as part ofSkulptur Projekte Münster (1987; 1997). Throughout her career she hasreceived numerous awards including, Carnegie Prize (1988), Kaiserring derStadt Goslar (1992), Praemium Imperiale Tokyo (2010), Pour le Mérite forSciences and the Arts (2016), and most recently, the Wilhelm LehmbruckPrize (2017). A first mid-career retrospective of her work was organizedin 1993 by the Guggenheim Museum, New York, traveling to the StedelijkVan Abbemuseum, Nationalgalerie Berlin, Kunsthalle Wien, Tate Galleryand Serpentine Gallery, London, and the Musée de Grenoble. Furtherretrospectives were presented at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2005, atGropius-Bau in Berlin in 2006, at Centre Pompidou Metz and simoultaneouslyat Museum Tinguely in Basel in 2019. On the occasion of her 80th birthday,a retrospective has been presented at Haus der Kunst München in 2024