Bill II

Isa Genzken

2001

Isa Genzken works with a wide spectrum of materials, and her oeuvre includes sculpture, film, video, installation, painting, and photography. However, the touchstone of her artistic practice has always been sculpture, reflecting her ongoing interest in the connections among art, architecture, and the urban environment. Bill II and Little Crazy Column (WU 2003.0004.0001) are paradigmatic of this interest. Each a slender column reaching upward, they mimic the slick appearance of the modern skyscraper on a miniature scale. Covered with mirrors, holographic foil, neon-colored tape, and, in the case of Bill II, photographs of food taken from magazines, they incorporate cheap, ephemeral, and almost vulgar-seeming material. The mirrors return the gaze of the viewer, turning an encounter with one’s own image into part of the artwork. The effect is one of fluidity and instability that brings modernist architecture back to a human scale and allows for an exchange on equal footing, albeit one that fragments the viewing subjects and fractures the world around them. [Exhibition brochure text, 2013]

Artist Isa Genzken (German, b. 1948)
Title Bill II
Date 2001
Medium Reflective glass, holographic foil, and paper on fiberboard support
Dimensions unframed | 110 1/4 x 12 3/16 x 12 3/16 in.
Credit line University purchase, Charles H. Yalem Art Fund, 2003
Object number WU 2003.0004.0002

Work type sculpture
Theme Architecture and Built Environment

Encountering the City: The Urban Experience in Contemporary Art
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 09/12/2014 - 01/04/2015

Contemporary German Art: Selections from the Permanent Collection
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 05/03/2013 - 09/07/2013

Precarious Worlds: Contemporary Art from Germany
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 09/09/2011 - 01/09/2012

Models and Prototypes
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 10/25/2006 - 12/31/2006

Contemporary German Art: Recent Acquisitions
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 01/17/2003 - 04/20/2003

Models and Prototypes 2006

Precarious Worlds: Contemporary Art from Germany 2011

4/14/2003
neugerriemschneider Gallery, Berlin

Inscription Along top edge, [twice] in red ink: "Bill II" 2001

Inscription Along top edge, in red ink: Isa Genzken 2001

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