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Rose III in L.A. (Courtesy of Hauser Wirth & Schimmel)
One of artist Isa Genzken's 30-foot-tall flowers is now on display in Hauser Wirth & Schimmel's courtyard in the Arts District. The massive sculpture is called Rose III (Rose II is currently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York), and it will be on display through the end of the year.
As demonstrated by artworks like Giant Rubber Duck and Giant Mr. Darcy in a Lake, the more massive everyday items and people are in their sculptural form, the better. Especially for Instagram. And, though she's worked in many mediums and scales, Genzken excels at this sort of thing—MoMA even called her "arguably one of the most important and influential female artists of the past 30 years," ahead of their 2014 retrospective on her work.
The rose—to get a sense of scale, above you can see it next to a French bulldog—is part of the gallery's "Isa Genzken. I Love Michael Asher" exhibit, the first Los Angeles solo exhibition for the artist. Here's more on that from the gallery:
Isa Genzken was in her late 20s when she visited Michael Asher in California on a travel grant from Dusseldorf Academy, where she had begun teaching in 1977. At this time, Genzken was producing sleek lacquered wood sculptures known as ‘Ellipsoids’ and ‘Hyperbolos.’ This minimalist body of work, which lasted through the early 1980s, engaged with spatial and social aspects of line, mass, scale, color and movement through and around the works. Since their meeting, Genzken’s diverse practice has encompassed sculpture, photography, drawing and painting. Her work borrows from the aesthetics of Minimalism, punk culture and assemblage art to confront the conditions of human experience in contemporary society and the uneasy social climate of capitalism.
In 1977, Michael Asher delivered small caravan trailer to the first Skulptur Projekte Münster. He had created sculpture out of experience, setting in motion his career-long project of ‘dislocation.’ In the years that followed, Asher’s interventions in galleries and museums included removing walls and doors, or keeping a museum open 24 hours a day. These deceptively simple architectural actions sought to expose the structural ‘givens’ of visual display and disrupt any sense of neutrality promised by galleries.
Over a forty-year period, Genzken’s practice and Asher’s aligned in surprisingly fluid ways, despite the visual dissonance of their output. Both mined the formal tenets of sculpture, for example the base, or support structure - whether a plinth or a rolling cart for Genzken, for Asher a wall, window or even an entire city. Both artists present us with alternative (and often discomforting) environments and the critical tools to navigate contradictions around us.
