"Postcard collages and texts by Rebecca Horn sent to Timothy Baum and friends," is the only explanation internationally known artist Rebecca Horn wanted to include in her latest book, probably her most accessible to a larger public. We do not know who Timothy Baum is. We have no idea who her friends are, nor when they received mail from this German artist, living in Berlin and Paris. We do not need to what Horn offers us is a revealing and, at the same time, enigmatic collection of her beautiful, often erotic, and most of all poetic, postcards. Horn presents to us a fragmented love story, told in painfully precise snapshots of lust and desire, intimate and precise, yet vague enough to be everyone's love story. By altering existing postcards, painting over them or gluing parts of different images on them, Horn creates collages that mirror life's beautiful and troubling contingencies. In what might be the artist's most personal book, Rebecca Horn presents life as a journey; we look at postcards from this journey from heaven. Or is it hell? In sharing her most intimate, most common emotional states in images and texts, Rebecca Horn creates an almost baroque dialogue between reality and the world of longing. 89 color. 7.25 x 9.5 in.
Rebecca Horn was a German visual artist, who was best known for her installation art, film directing, and her body modifications such as Einhorn (Unicorn), a body-suit with a very large horn projecting vertically from the headpiece. She directed the films Der Eintänzer (1978), La ferdinanda: Sonate für eine Medici-Villa (1982) and Buster's Bedroom (1990). Horn lived and worked in Paris and Berlin.