Isa Genzken quotes - page 2

She [Isa's mother] called up Lufthansa and said, 'I have this daughter, you see, and she needs airplane windows,' she said. That's how she did it. (Isa Genzken)
.. you see they hung my painting here [on her show 'Wind', 2009] I did that in the early 1990s. People never really liked them so much back then, they thought they looked more like photographs. Actually, I was doing them when I was still married to Gerhard Richter [till 1993], and it was somehow in relation to what he was doing, you know, these kind of side-to-side gestural abstracts – done like this [gestures as if pulling a squeegee over a surface from one side to the other] like paintings of the 1950s. Mine were called 'Basic Research', they were rubbings of oil paint on canvas – frottages of the floor of my studio. I did quite a few of these. [Gerhard] Richter put one up in his studio for some time... But he found it too hard and then took it out after a while. View quote
Isa Genzken
Each one of those ['Ellipsoids'] took at least three months [each]. I was starting those, when I was still at the Düsseldorf Academy. There was a very nice man in the workshop there who was very helpful in the process of making them. And they were extremely complicated – to get the shape right and everything. I mean one could get them sent to a factory, and have them produced according to these computer drawings, but somehow I didn't really want to do this at the time – and also I did not have the money to do that anyway. Once I tried to have one fabricated in this way, but when it came back there was nothing there somehow. It was not like the ones that were made in the workshop. View quote
Isa Genzken
I think that photography has a lot to do with sculpture – because it is three-dimensional and because it depicts reality. For example, I have always been able to relate to photography more than to painting. When I was photographing the hi-fi adverts ['Hi-Fi-Serie' (1979)] I thought to myself, everyone has one of these towers at home. It's the latest thing, the most modern equipment available. So a sculpture must be at least as modern and must stand up to it. Then I hung the pictures on the wall and put an ellipsoid on the floor and thought, the ellipsoid must be at least as good as this advert. At least as good. That's how good a modern sculpture has to be. Do you see what I mean? That was the dialogue... View quote
Isa Genzken
Yes, throughout our marriage [with Gerhard Richter during 1982 - 1993], we influenced each other mutually. We didn't have a student-teacher kind of relationship. View quote
Isa Genzken
Well, I knew I was an artist the moment I woke up in my mother's belly and, as an artist, I shouldn't have to give interviews.... in some parts of the world, you get scrutinized for saying the wrong thing about art and in other regions, you get scrutinized for saying nothing at all. View quote
Isa Genzken
I tell you, wind is the most difficult thing to put into an object.... here it's a bit more in this next sculpture. View quote
Isa Genzken
I had just had an operation, I was totally bored and so I just took my camera and took some pictures of myself. Out of boredom. I only realised afterwards that this work was something special. Taking photos in the clinic and publishing them in a catalogue.... it suddenly took on a kind of seriousness. Everyone's scared of clinics, and no-one wants to see what a clinic looks like from the inside. Well not really. And everyone's a bit scared of having to go there themselves. And there I was in there. And I stand by it. And I used the clinic as a studio and started taking photos. And then I felt better. Just because it let me do something. View quote
Isa Genzken