Artist:
Iza Genzekn (born 1948 in Bad Oldesloe, Germany; lives and works in Berlin, Germany).

Description:
A series of six assemblages built with plywood, all on pedestals.

“Laura Hoptman… interprets this composition, which Genzken called ‘Fuck the Bauhaus,’ as a critique of modernist hubris—a Teutonic ideal of control, order, and rationality that collapsed under Hitler like a house of cards. But she also discerns a redemptive impulse to it. Genzken, she writes, would like to replace dehumanizing, corporate urban development with a livelier, more soulful ‘accidental modernity’.”
—Judith Thurman, “Iza Genzken’s Beautiful Ruins,” The New Yorker, November 26, 2013.

“‘Fuck the Bauhaus,’ 2000 is a grouping of eye-level pedestals on which ‘buildings’ are made of throwaway matter. The title is aggressive, yes, but it is not clear if this address to the modernist masters signifies a flip of the finger or a romp in the sheets. The piece marks an important transition in Genzken’s practice, as autonomous objects multiply, then form clusters before finally, in the last decade of production, assuming the character of jumbles of debased junk. It is in this progression that Genzken spearheads a sculptural practice that so many younger makers would follow, and that curators and critics would later identify as a tendency for the ‘unmonumental’ or the ‘precarious’ in the art of today. Unlike many artists influenced by her, the material transfer into art in Genzken’s work serves to demolish any vestigial allure this stuff might originally have inspired.”
—”Isa Genzken: Retrospective,” Discover: The DIS Blog, last modified November 22, 2013.