Isa Genzken: Retrospective; installation view, MCA Chicago. April 12-August 3, 2014. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.

Chicago is the second stop for this show (it was in New York over the winter), which was organized in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art and the Dallas Museum of Art. Maybe audiences were slightly befuddled the first time around? The museum has a little fun with the idea that the Berlin-based artist may not have “man-on-the-street” name recognition in America. In a short video near the entrance to the show, an interviewer asks a string of puzzled faces, “Do you know who Isa Genzken is?” Seems a bit graceless in the context of a multi-decade career retrospective, particularly given that the MCA press release declares—in the first sentence—“Isa Genzken is one of the most important and influential sculptors of our time.” Of course, the last time a major Chicago-based institution featured Genzken’s work—in 1992—the gallery had the word “renaissance,” not “contemporary,” in its title.

Isa Genzken: Retrospective; installation view, MCA Chicago. April 12-August 3, 2014. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.

Organizers of the show assert that the retrospective is meant to atone for the omission of Genzken’s presence in American contemporary museums, simultaneously celebrating and introducing the artist’s work. The strength of the show will certainly evoke questions as to why the artist has not received more attention in America. September 11 has been a focus of Genzken’s work since the 2001 terror attacks, which occurred while she was visiting New York. Shortly before that time, the artist began to create sculptural assemblages combining neon-colored plastics, toys, metal lampshades, mirrors, cheap décor, and other shiny detritus supported by crude, tower-like pedestals in a series called Fuck the Bauhaus. Stacked like miniature skyscrapers, the lightly differentiated objects appear used up, dead as disco zombies, but so urgent in their immediacy—so contemporary—that they sever all connection to form and taste pre-Rauschenberg. Like Walter Gropius, Genzken makes an aggressive claim to the new, but in a way that is hostile to the progressive intentions of Bauhaus modernism.

After 2001, Genzken’s neon-overload approach to form took on a vastly more political dimension. The works produced for the series Empire/Vampire: Who Kills Death? again mine the excesses of mass production, but with more specific symbolic intention. Evoking 9/11, Da Vinci (2003) consists of a panel of four windows from a commercial airplane. The window shades have been spray-painted with progressively drippier paint. A Lilliputian city (or cemetery?) of roller-board luggage is prominently featured in Oil XI (2007), an installation produced for the German pavilion at the Venice Binnale. Here, the suitcases stand upright, some embellished with stuffed owls and images of dogs and cats. Floating overhead are three NASA space suits. An installation titled American Room (2004) features a silver-painted Scrooge McDuck on a CEO-sized desk flanked by a series of sculptures that include kitschy stuffed eagles—a symbol of both German and American nationalism. Connections to empire, capitalism, history, internet kitsch, and global political conflict underpin Genzken’s ever-mutable exploration of found-object assemblage throughout these series.

Isa Genzken: Retrospective; installation view, MCA Chicago. April 12-August 3, 2014. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.

Earlier work, particularly the concrete, plaster, and steel sculptures she created during the ’80s and ’90s, also suggest ruin and conflict, albeit in a far more subtle fashion. Minimal in their form, many of the pieces from this time period take the shape of cracked concrete rectangles Genzken calls fensters (windows). Their brutal severity is evocative of Fascist aesthetics, yet the materials, the historical context, and the notion of windows as transitional portals are not disconnected to the Berlin Wall. The sculptures are open-ended enough that they could be completely apolitical. However, little breadcrumbs throughout the show lead back to Germany’s postwar history, like the use of red, yellow, and black in some of her earliest work, or the fact that a series of advertisements for hi-fi equipment, rephotographed in the style of Richard Prince, are from German, American, French, and Japanese media sources, all of which were major players in World War II. Perhaps the most optimistic series in the show, the images unify the countries through a common advertising language. It is also within this series that the seeds for a lifelong exploration of found materials and appropriated sources began. Seeing so much of Genzken’s work in a single exhibition is a great way to visualize that path.

Isa Genzken: Retrospective is on view at MCA Chicago until August 3, 2014.

Mz 601, 1923; paint and paper on cardboard; 17 × 15 in. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Schwitters’ hallmark was hybridity.  He started his career as a painter and then moved to collage, assemblage, and sculpture, all while never truly leaving painting behind.  He was associated with and influenced by many movements, including Dada, Futurism, Cubism, and Constructivism, appropriating what he thought useful or provocative from each and synthesizing it with fragments from the next without becoming dogmatic about any of them.  In 1919 Schwitters coined the term merz to describe his work.  The origin of this word was a scrap of an advertisement for a bank, and is taken from the German word kommerziell (commerce).  He saw that snippet of a word as the embodiment of what he was trying to accomplish—to take a part of something and make it his own—and he organized his practice around it.  As curator Lucinda Barnes explained, “The merz approach is to connect everything.”

The works in the exhibition are mostly small, some no bigger than the palm of your hand.   Schwitters clipped bits of words from various sources and mixed them with other materials such as paper, fabric, feathers, and paint. Like the word merz from kommerziel, the words are fragmented.  But rather than making them incomprehensible, this practice opens the text up, transforming each word from a linguistic fence to something looser and more associative.  They sometimes provide clues to his interests and lifestyle.  For example, a few collages attest to Schwitters’ more pleasurable habits: snippets of labels from wine bottles, chocolate wrappers, and tobacco often make appearances.  The intimacy of each composition invites an almost forensic inspection, and I often found myself nearly fogging the glass with my breath in order to identify and understand each assortment of fragments so meticulously combined.

pink collage, 1940; collage, paper and tissue paper on pasteboard; 10 1/2 x 8 5/8 in.; Collection of David Ilya Brandt and Daria Brandt.

Mz. 310 Carneval. (1921) is one such composition, where fragments of small, readable text are mixed with parts of individual letters and torn pieces of striped paper in a confetti-like arrangement.  Another is Mz. 410 irgensowas. (1922) (“something or other”) where the text fragments take on an almost Constructivist look.  In both of these, Schwitters covered the edges of the collage with a mat to create a clean, perfect rectangle that reigns in the implied chaos of the interior composition.  By making the edges precise and regular, Schwitters creates a window from which to view this arrangement, mimicking the era’s growing interest in the camera-eye, selecting and framing the world.  In contrast, the two small examples of his Oil wiping on newspaper (1939) feature compositions mounted on top of a substrate instead of matted beneath it.  In these, the edges are irregular and raw.  Often the compositions can be “read” like a Rorschach blot.  pink collage (1940) only looked abstract from a distance, but as I drew nearer it resolved into a dark tree trunk with white mountains rising up behind it.  Up close, the compositions have a particularity and a specificity that makes them seem representational.

Mz x 19, 1947; collage, oil, paper, and cardboard on cardboard; 6 1/8 x 5 1/4 in.; Collection of Ellsworth Kelly.

At first, Schwitters claimed that the collages were “not intended to mean anything, [but] only to be strong compositions in color.”  He later amended this view: “Poetry arises from the interaction of these elements, meaning is important only if it is employed as one such factor.  I play off sense against nonsense.”  Although the work is considered historical, the approach that created it is thoroughly contemporary, and artists such as Damien Hirst and Ed Ruscha have cited Schwitters as an influence.   He anticipated the rise of commercialism, created collage work to materialize the saturation of information in the modern world, and predicted the indiscriminate use of varied materials as a way to reflect on the society in which it was created. The intimacy of scale and the way the work seems simultaneously expansive and specific makes it well worth seeing in person.  Upon attending an exhibition of Schwitters’ work in 1959, Robert Rauschenberg claimed, “I felt like he made it all just for me.”