Isa Genzken

Kinderschirm

2004

Isa Genzken looks to design, advertising, and mass media as well as the histories of art and architecture to make collages, paintings, and photographs, though her focus is primarily on sculpture. She is interested in how aesthetic styles—the unadorned angularity of modernist architecture, for example— embody and enforce political and social ideologies. Her tower-like assemblage Kinderschirm is a chaotic collection of disparate elements brought together atop a wood plinth, like a flower blooming from a thick stalk. The column is a recurring motif for Genzken, a “pure” architectural trope on which to explore relationships between “high art” and the mass-produced products of popular culture.

Isa Genzken (b. 1948, Bad Oldesloe, Germany; lives and works in Berlin)
Kinderschirm, 2004
Plastic, metal, wood, fabric, and palm leaf
86 1/2 x 47 1/2 x 33 7/8 in.
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Partial and promised gift of Leonard Nimoy and Susan Bay-Nimoy