In 1972 Horn was the youngest participant of the
documenta in
Kassel. Horn was one of a generation of German artists who came to international prominence in the 1980s. She practiced
body art, but worked in different media, including performance art,
installation art, sculpture and film. She also wrote poetry. Sometimes her poetry was influenced by her work and sometimes vice-versa. When she returned to the Hamburg academy she continued to make cocoon-like things. She worked with padded body extensions and prosthetic bandages. In the late 1960s she began creating performance art and continued to use bodily extensions.
Body sculpture In 1968 Horn produced her first body sculptures, in which she attached objects and instruments to the human body, taking as her theme the contact between a person and his or her environment.
Einhorn (Unicorn) is one of Horn's best known
performance pieces: a long horn worn on her head, its title a pun on her name. She presented
Einhorn at the 1972
documenta 5. Its subject is a woman who was described by Horn as "very bourgeois", "21 years-old and ready to marry. She is spending her money on new bedroom furniture". She walks through a field and forest on a summer morning wearing only a white horn protruding directly from the front of the top of her head, held there by straps. These straps are almost identical to the ones in
Frida Kahlo's painting
The Broken Column. The image, with wheat floating around the woman's hips, is simultaneously mythic and modern. In 1972 she created
Finger Gloves, a performance piece and the main prop of that performance piece. They are worn like gloves, but the finger form extends with balsa wood and cloth. By being able to see what she was touching and the way in which she was touching it, it felt as if her fingers were extended and in her mind the illusion was created that she was actually touching what the extensions were touching. A similar work called "Scratching Both Walls at Once" was part of her 1974
Berlin Exercises series. In this piece, the finger extension gloves she created were longer, measured to specifically fit the performance space. If the chosen participant stood in the middle of the room, they could exactly touch opposing walls simultaneously. Another piece that involves the illusion of feeling with one's hand is
Feather Fingers. (1972). A feather is attached to each finger with a metal ring. The hand becomes "as symmetrical (and as sensitive) as a bird's wing". When touching the opposite arm with these feather fingers one can feel the touch on the left arm and of the fingers on the right hand moving as if to touch the left arm, but it is instead the feathers which make contact. Horn described the effect: "It is as if one hand had suddenly become disconnected from the other like two utterly unrelated beings. My sense of touch becomes so disrupted that the different behavior of each hand triggers contradictory sensations." This piece focuses greatly on sensitivity.
Sculpture In her works of the 1970s and 1980s Horn continued to explore the image of
feathers. Many of her feathered pieces wrap a figure in the manner of a
cocoon, or function as masks or fans, to cover or imprison the body. Some of these pieces are
Black Cockfeathers (1971),
Cockfeather Mask (1973),
Cockatoo Mask (1973) and
Paradise Widow (1975). In the 1980s, various "machines" were the subjects of Horn's work. Among others, she created a machine to mimic the human act of painting in
The Little Painting School Performs a Waterfall (1988). Thirteen feet above the floor on a gallery wall, three fan-shaped paint brushes mounted on flexible metal arms slowly flutter down into cups filled with blue and green acrylic paint. After a few seconds of immersion they snap backward, spattering paint onto the wall, the ceiling, the floor and canvases projected from the wall below. The brushes immediately resume their descent and the cycle is repeated until each canvas is covered in paint. In the 1990s a series of her sculptures were presented in places of historical importance. Examples are the
Tower of the Nameless in
Vienna (1994),
Concert in Reverse in
Munich (1997),
Mirror of the Night in an abandoned
synagogue in
Cologne (1998) and
Concert for Buchenwald at
Weimar (1999). In Weimar, the
Concert for Buchenwald was composed on the premises of a former tram depot. Horn layered 40 metre long walls of ashes behind glass, as archives of petrifaction. At the same time, the theme of bodily vitality, which she had been exploring since the 1970s, was developed in
site-specific art installations that investigated the subject of the latent energy of places and the magnetic flows of space. This cycle comprises
High Moon, New York (1991),
El Reio de la Luna, Barcelona (1992) and
Spirit di Madreperla, Naples (2002). For the
1992 Summer Olympics in
Barcelona, Horn was commissioned to create the steel sculpture ''L'Estel Ferit''. Many Horn works also explore ambiguities in the idea of
lenses. One would think that a large tinted lens exists for protection and cover, but it also has the effect of drawing attention to the person or figure behind it. The paradox of looking out and looking back is explored in her installation piece for
Taipei 101,
Dialogue between Yin and Yang (2002). The work sets up interactions between viewers, environment and sculpture as it uses binoculars and mirrors to suggest the
passive and active energies.
Film In what amounted to over ten years of life in New York, Horn undertook the production of highly narrative, full-length films, and incorporated the sculptures and movements from her earlier work into this new context of film, transforming their significance. Horn made her first feature-length film in 1978,
Der Eintänzer, about a young man named Max, a blind man and twins. Her later films include
La Ferdinanda: Sonata for a Medici Villa and ''
Buster's Bedroom. La Ferdinanda'' is in German; the other films are in English. In all of these films Horn's obsession with the imperfect body and the balance between figure and objects is apparent. She also collaborated with
Jannis Kounellis and produced some films, including the film ''Buster's Bedroom
(1990) which was shot by the Academy Award-winning Sven Nykvist and stars Donald Sutherland, Geraldine Chaplin and Martin Wuttke. For Buster's Bedroom
und Roussel'', she collaborated with German writer
Martin Mosebach on the respective screenplays. A number of Horn's mechanised sculptures appeared in her films, notably
The Feathered Prison Fan (1978)—covered in large overlapping fans that is big enough to enclose an adult inside—in
Der Eintänzer and
The Peacock Machine (1979–80), another sculpture that folds and unfolds white peacock plumage in
La Ferdinanda. ==Exhibitions==