Rebecca Horn: Fata Morgana

Rebecca Horn is always open to new methods for generating art. In recent years she has combined painting and photography to produce “photo-painting,” in which overpainted photographs are rephotographed, overpainted again and photographed again, in a wild dialogue between spontaneity (paint) and document (photography) that erases or obscures the finality of each successive gesture. “For me, the process of photo-painting is more about writing in a variety of rhythms, from tiny dots to scattered paint that spreads in all directions to swiftly touched marks,” Horn testifies. In Fata Morgana she combines photo-paintings with films produced for two cinematic-operatic works, The Deadly Flower and Fata Morgana. In the latter, Horn’s photo-paintings abstractly extrapolate the opera’s impassioned narrative as it is replete with bloodshed and lunacy, enacting visual narratives in collaboration with the music. Fata Morgana beautifully records this latest development in Horn’s work.