Sean Kelly Gallery has announced the death of Rebecca Horn, one of the most important German artists, at the age of 80.

Since the beginning of the 1970s Horn’s oeuvre constituted an ever-growing flow of performances, films, sculptures, spatial installations, drawings, and photographs. The essence of their imagery came out of the tremendous precision of the physical and technical functionality she used to stage her works each time within a particular space.

Horn’s diverse body of work was bound together by a consistency in logic; each new work appears to develop stringently from the preceding one. In her first performances, the body-extensions, Horn explored the equilibrium between body and space - performing with body extensions, masks, and feather objects. This was followed by kinetic sculptures and large, site-specific installations to honor places charged with political and historical importance. The objects used in the sculptures - violins, suitcases, batons, ladders, pianos, feather fans, and metronomes - moved beyond their defined materiality and were continuously transposed into ever-changing metaphors touching on mythical, historical, literary, and spiritual imagery. Each of Horn’s installations was a step towards breaking down the boundaries of space and time completely, offering glimpses of a materially liberated universe.