Isa Genzken: Geldbilder, Hauser & Wirth

Isa Genzken, who lives and works in Berlin, is truly a child of the 1960s. She embraced the often violent, leftist ideology of her contemporaries and has now progressed to the uneasiness of human experience in the capitalist world of today.

Hauser & Wirth offers a rare chance to enjoy Isa Genzken’s work away from the crowds, as you would normally expect to see her in major retrospective shows at venues like the Isa Genzken MoMA exhibition last year, the Whitechapel Gallery, Venice Biennale, or later in 2015 at the ICA, London.

Hauser & Wirth London exhibition

Isa Genzken is known for pushing the boundaries of sculpture with her assemblages of found-objects. However, this contemporary art exhibition spotlights her variety of talents by contextualising a new series of mixed media paintings with earlier concrete sculptures.

These raw and aggressive paintings comprise of thick, vivid marks, smeared onto the canvas in an apparently random fashion, with coins and notes dotted across the surface. Although not the first time she has used money in her artworks to critique capitalism, here the material becomes a “painterly medium in itself”.

As Genzken’s canvases are literally plastered with money, there is a sweet irony in the fact that her work now commands such a high price.