Dressed people up as unicorns and created creepy shows: Rebecca Horn, who was called one of the most prominent German artists, has died

Rebecca Horn, described as one of Germany's most prominent contemporary artists, died on September 8 at the age of 81. She was known for the bizarre, life-like mechanisms she created with her own hands.

Horn invented strikingly bizarre costumes, which she then used in her performances - the costumes radically altered not only a person's appearance, but also her proportions and movements. The artist "transformed" performers into real unicorns, and machine mechanisms made them "dance." We learned of her death on September 11, writes ArtNews. The terrible news was reported by New York's Rebecca Gallery, but it is unclear what caused the tragedy.

Horn's mysterious, seductive works are the pride of her homeland, Germany. There, her work has been a staple of exhibitions such as Documenta, held every five years in Kassel. But her work has also been exhibited internationally, from the Venice Biennale to New York's Guggenheim Museum. Today, her influence is evident in a wide range of works, from Matthew Barney's ritualistic films to Pipilotti Rist's unconventional videos.

Her performance-oriented works from the 1960s opened up new possibilities for the female body, equipping the participants with appendages that made them look like animals. Horne's mechanized sculptures of the following decades continued this theme, offering installations made of metal, liquids, mirrors and other materials that seemed not quite human, but not quite inorganic either.

Such works made it impossible to categorize Horn, an artist whose work never directly expressed her thematic interests. Her art spoke in a language that could only be felt, not understood. She touched on uncomfortable mental states, and sometimes even offered viewers a path to emancipation.

Rebecca Horn was born in 1944 in Michelstadt, Germany. From an early age, she was fascinated by Johann Valentin Andrea, a German theologian who wrote about alchemy in the 15th century, and Raymond Roussel, a 20th-century French poet whose work became defining for many modernists. These figures instilled in Horne a love of all things fantastic, a passion that eventually attracted the attention of surrealist painter Meret Oppenheim, who later became Horne's friend and an admirer of her early work.

Only verified information we have in the Telegram channel OBOZ.UA and Viber. Don't fall for fakes!