Isa Genzken - inside out

Ear: the organ of hearing and equilibrium in vertebrates, in humans consisting of an external ear that gathers sound vibrations, a middle ear in which the vibrations resonate against the tympanicmembrane, and a fluid-filled internal ear that maintains balance and that conducts the tympanicvibrations to the auditory nerve, which transmits them as impulses to the brain.

Sensitised to register the external vibrations of the environment, the ear also internalises the word outside it: it is a figure of the inside out and these pictures therefore exhibit the precarious threshold between public and private life. It is with a consideration of this instrumental process that we can begin to view in Genzken's work an appeal to architectural space relative to the mythical divide between public and private. 

Her following work, a series of 'self portraits' of a kind - x-rays of her head - along with photographs of the facades of New York buildings extend this. Here the image of a head acts as an internal landscape, poised in relation to the blunt and external surfaces of New York's architecture. The interior space - generally perceived as private - is intertwined with the public space of the architectural environment.

Much of Genzken's following work has progressively collapsed these two areas of spatial experience. With the Urlaub series, for example, Genzken presents a perspective into the workings of domestic life and its projections; here the external constructions of vacation homes can be seen to act as mirrors for fantasies of retreat from the outside world. In her wider assemblages the creation of suggestive space acts as a means for facilitating this collision. Plinths stand as neutral development stands for construction; anonymous towers reflective of power and autonomy become burdened with articles of the personal. In Mutter Mit Kind, Genzken's minimalist box is both domestic interior, and psychological projection, incorporating furniture, children's toys, and a madonna-like image, suggestive of a disrupted alter, projecting an element of vulnerability and instability. Genzken's installation becomes simultaneously painterly and architectural: her mirror plates like translucent building facades, highlighting this illusion between flat and perceived space. 

A reference to architecture can be seen to underly all of these pieces and supports her concern with the concept of the social sphere. Genzken's initial engagement with minimalism can be seen as vital to this. Following Carl Andre's call for 'sculpture as space' Minimalism was necessarily an art of location: of the ways in which the body registered space as it was shaped by those sculptural objects. The movement of the body in space served to measure that relationship, which was seen to be in continuous flux depending on the conditions. 

To conclude her work may be summarised as a focus on the ways in which the reality that surrounds and shapes us operate: architecture, design, advertising, media sociopolitical themes and fields of tension linked with them - significantly tensions between private and public. 

My interest in the domestic may therefore be promoted by its relationship with the exterior. From a sociological perspective it could posses for me the role of a personal haven of individuality and subjectivity. However my interest in repetition which is bred from the industrial organs, suggests that perhaps it is the ultimate reflection of the exterior within the interior that interests me?

Questions: How do the places where we live from the essence of our conception of space?