Rebecca Horn obituary

In 1967, the artist Rebecca Horn was confined to a German sanatorium for much of the year. On a break from her studies in Hamburg, and making work with toxic glass fibre, she severely damaged her lungs. Bedbound, and as a way of processing the loneliness, Horn made sketches of her own body, adding to which she drew an extraordinary array of appendages, symbols of her own claustrophobia and reliance on the clunky hospital equipment that helped her breathe. In one a huge horn protrudes from the head, in another pendulums hang down from a face mask. There are straitjackets in others, and hoses and pipes attached to breasts in frightening fashion.

When Horn was eventually discharged, these drawings became the basis for some of the artist’s 22 “body extension” sculptures, themselves utilised in performance and film works: in Unicorn (1970) the giant ungainly horn is strapped to a woman’s head as she walks naked through a field; Pencil Mask (1972) is a torturous-looking headgear, from which a series of pencils spike out, worn by Horn to create drawings; Finger Gloves (1972) grotesquely elongates the performer’s digits to the ground, a work rumoured to have inspired Tim Burton’s film Edward Scissorhands.

These works established Horn, who has died aged 80, as one of the most provocative artists around, though any shock value was strictly utilised to convey her themes of transhumanism, technology and bioethics, and not her own self-promotion. In 2023, her longterm US gallerist Sean Kelly told the Guardian: “She belongs to a generation of artists who were real serious artists. She’s not doing a Louis Vuitton handbag or something like that.”

In 1972 the curator Harald Szeemann included her work in Documenta 5, in Kassel; she was the youngest artist in the show. A year later she had her first solo exhibition at Galerie René Block, in West Berlin. Increasingly private as her fame grew, she appeared less in her own work, embarking on a series of kinetic sculptures (in part inspired by her childhood love of Raymond Roussel’s proto-dadaist novel Locus Solus, centred on the deranged inventions of a scientist). Peacock Machine (1981) featured white feathers animated by motors; Ballet of the Woodpeckers (1986) was a hall of mirrors that echoed with the regular tapping of motorised hammers against the glass. She became attracted to showing in heavily loaded venues: Ballet of the Woodpeckers was first installed in a psychiatric hospital in Vienna for the benefit of its residents before it entered any gallery.

The personal anguish that Horn had previously channelled was also replaced, with explorations of inherited and cultural trauma. Invited to show at Skulptur Projekte Münster in 1987, she chose to exhibit a new commission in a tower in which the Gestapo had tortured prisoners: Concert in Reverse included 42 mechanical hammers and 40 grave candles. “The tragic or melancholic aspect is important to me. I don’t even want [the installations] to work for ever,” she once said.

Sometimes she dealt with contemporaneous politics: Bees’ Planetary Map (1998), consisting of a room of empty beehives accompanied by a ghostly recording of bees emptying a hive, was made in response to the horrors then unfolding in the former Yugoslavia.

Horn was born in Michelstadt, Germany, to Ernst and Margarethe. Ernst was an industrialist with a love of opera, an artform Rebecca adored, but it was her Romanian governess who taught her to draw.

In 1963 she enrolled at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg, to study art. On recovery from the lung complaint, she was awarded a scholarship to study at Saint Martin’s School of Art (now Central Saint Martins) in London in 1971.

After Documenta 5 (she would revisit the festival again in 1977, 1982 and 1992), a show at René Block Gallery, New York, precipitated a move to the city for a decade. “If a country asks me to make a piece of work for them, I go and live there,” she told the author Jeannette Winterson for the Guardian in 2005. “I use my body, I use what happens to me, and I make something.” In the US she discovered ballet and made Der Eintänzer (1978), a 47-minute film that culminates in young female dancers attempting steps while lashed together.

Horn returned to Europe permanently in 1981, first to Paris, then settling in Berlin, taking a teaching position at its University of the Arts in 1989, the first of many such posts in the city, held long after any financial necessity. In 2009, retiring from education, she moved to the resort of Bad König, with her studio based in her grandfather’s former textile factory.

In 1989 she made Kiss of the Rhinoceros, a kinetic work in which two curved steel pincers, each with a bladed metal horn attached, are brought together by a motor, for the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre, at the Pompidou, Paris. The work was shown again at the Venice Biennale in 2022, the fourth time the artist had participated in the biennale’s main show.

A mid-career retrospective of her work was staged in 1993 by the Guggenheim, New York, travelling to museums throughout Europe, with a double billing at the Tate and Serpentine galleries in London. Horn’s work returned to the UK in 2005 for another retrospective, this time at the Hayward Gallery, London. In 2019 the Centre Pompidou Metz and Museum Tinguely in Basel held concurrent shows. In April this year Haus der Kunst München hosted yet another retrospective, which is open until October, and this month a show opened at her Berlin gallery, Thomas Schulte.

• Rebecca Horn, artist, born 24 March 1944; died 6 September 2024