Isa Genzken (b. 1948) is one of the most influential women artists of the present. In the spring of 2015, her most recent workgroup will be on view for the first time in Germany at the MMK 1 branch of the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst. Since the 1970s the sculptor Genzken has developed an artistic stance that, though making reference to Pop Art and Minimalism, has nonetheless brought forth a thoroughly idiosyncratic and unique visual language.

Since early 2000, Genzken has been working increasingly with consumerist objects, combining them with industrial materials as well as photographs and fragments of images from the popular media. She treats these individual elements as set-piece components of our contemporary world, which she brings together to create abstract and surreally narrative constellations.

Titled Isa Genzken: New Works, the exhibition will feature some twenty sculptures of individual figures and figural groups representing artistically alienated self-portraits of the artist. The “actors”, as Genzken styles them, wear items from her own personal wardrobe edged with decorative materials and supplemented with articles of protective clothing. The figures are moreover camouflaged with reflective sheets of synthetic material or rendered silent with multi-coloured adhesive tape.

Genzken designed the German Pavilion at the 52nd Biennale in Venice in 2007 and in 2013 received recognition for her life’s work with a comprehensive retrospective at the MoMA Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Conceived in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition is being co-produced with the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg.