Bonn, Germany
Visitors to the last Venice Biennale might recall Isa Genzken’s 23 models for outdoor sculptures, which appeared in the main pavilion. If not, this probably has more to do with curator Okwui Enwezor’s incomprehensible decision to present them with, of all things, Walker Evans’s legendary photo series “Let us now praise famous men” than with the sculptures themselves. The models were recently shown again in Bonn, with 12 new additions; together, these 35 works document Genzken’s public projects from 1986 to the present. The exhibition, however, offered far more than mere documentation. The models, executed by the Berlin architectural and model-building firm of Henrik Hilsbos in conjunction with Genzken, unleash a surprising sculptural power. Such aesthetic completeness negates any assumption that a model-like portrayal of large-scale, and in some instances, gigantic, formats necessarily results in something dry and didactic …see the entire review in the print version of July/August’s Sculpture magazine.
