Rebecca Horn

Piccoli spiriti blu (Little Blue Spirits) is composed of 72 circles of blue lights of different sizes, initially installed around the Gran Madre church, and then moved to Monte dei Cappuccini, where they surround the church, extending to a wing of the former convent. In both locations, the work contributes to changing the perception of space by creating an atmosphere of suspension with unreal tones. If before it was the aura of mystery that some attribute to the Gran Madre, it is now the fog on the Turin hill that amplifies the effect.

The energy that springs from the places is at the centre of other light installations created between the 1990s and 2000s, such as Spiriti di madreperla (Mother-of-pearl spirits), in piazza del Plebiscito in Naples, where white luminous rings suspended above cast-iron skulls emerging from the ground defined an energy field between earth and sky, evoking life facing eternity.

Rebecca Horn (Michelstadt, Germany 1944 - Bad König, 2024) worked with different languages and media. In her early performances in the 1970s, she investigated the relationship between body and space through “bodily extensions”, structures and masks to be worn, which were soon replaced by complex mechanical devices, kinetic machines that initially appeared in her films, and interacted with the environment through elements and objects such as mirrors, funnels, feathers.

Between the 1980s and 1990s, Horn created site-specific sculptures in places charged with political and historical meaning. In her universe of materials and forms rich in metaphorical and symbolic references, there is also the power of writing, which in works such as Book of Ashes (2002) evokes the victims of 11 September 2001 whose names she traces on a mirror.

Rebecca Horn has had solo exhibitions in museums such as the MOCA in Los Angeles, the Guggenheim in New York, and the Tate Modern in London, and has won several awards, including the Documenta Prize (1986), the Praemium Imperiale of Tokyo (2010) and Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize (2017). He participated in the Venice Biennale (2022) and recent solo exhibitions include Centre Pompidou Metz (2019); Tinguely Museum, Basel (2020); Bank Austria Kunstforum, Vienna (2021); and Haus der Kunst, Munich (2024).

Silvia Maria Sara Cammarata