Biography

The Yanghyun Foundation (Eunyoung Choi, Chief Director), announced the winner of the 2009 Yanghyun Prize at the awards ceremony held
at Centennial Memorial Hall, Korea University, Seoul, on Oct. 9.
Isa Genzken was awarded the 2009 Yanghyun Prize as the honorable winner of the year. Isa Genzken was born in Bad Oldesloe, Germany in 1948. She studied
at the University of Visual Arts in Hamburg, the University of Visual Arts in Berlin and the State Art Academy in Düsseldorf.
Isa Genzken is among the leading contemporary artists and one whose works are permeated by her responsiveness to fundamental social, political and economic conditions.

One of the leading artists to have emerged in Germany since the 1980s, Genzken is notable for the way she combines personal elements
with references to architecture, modernism and art history.
She is interested in the ruins of material culture, particularly architectural detritus, and the combination of materials in her work is remarkable, encompassing animal heads,
fluorescent plastic, spray-pained pine cones, concrete blocks, glass, mirrored sheets, aeroplane windows and children’s umbrellas, to name a few.

So her work displays the greatest possible variety of references to architecture and industrial design as she continues to surprise her public time and again
with new groups of works.
Her view of the world is dominated by an ambivalent and often dismayed look at the disturbing, instable and contradictory sides of human nature.
Invariably hypermodern, Genzken works as an artist on the cutting edge of the nervousness and excessiveness of our existence.

This combination of Minimal Art, constructivism and the further psychedelic components in terms of personal, audience and social perspectives,
allows Genzken to adopt an unusual and influential position in current art discourse

Work

Der Amerikanische Raum, 2004, Installation,
mixed media (detail) Dimenscions Variable

OIL XIII, 2007, aluminium, metal foil, Adhesive tape,
paper, 200 x 70(cm)

OIL, 2007, Installation view, German Pavilion,
La Biennale di Venezia, Venice 2007

Ohr, 2002, Digital print on high performance foil,
580 x 390 (cm) Outdoor project, Innsbruck

Jury Citation

Isa Genzken is among the leading contemporary artists and one whose works are permeated by her responsiveness to fundamental social, political and economic conditions.
Her view of the world is dominated by an ambivalent and often dismayed look at the disturbing, instable and contradictory sides of human nature.
Invariably hypermodern, Genzken works as an artist on the cutting edge of the nervousness and excessiveness of our existence.
In her sculptural works, Genzken has always grappled with the range of meanings pertaining to three-dimensional objects.

In her ellipsoid floor pieces of the late 1970s, in the architectonic plaster and concrete structures of the 1980s, and in her most recent works pieced together
out of consumer goods or items of everyday use she remains firmly within the coordinates of the traditional definition of sculpture.
Yet her works also evince a fragility, an imperfection and an openness which together make for a tense relationship to the context in which they are placed
as well as hinting at a further autobiographical, psycho-emotional dimension.
This combination of traditional sculpture, allusions to Minimal Art and Conceptual Art, and also psychedelic components allows Genzken to adopt
an unusual and influential position in current art discourse.