Isa Genzken: Retrospective: Dedicated to Jasper Johns and Myself
Among the most celebrated contemporary European artists, Genzken is less known to an American audience. Her relative obscurity will end this fall with the artist's first US retrospective, which opened in November at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and will travel to co-organizing institutions in Dallas and Chicago. The catalogue is therefore a crucial primer, handily consolidating critical writings covering over four decades of Genzken's art. [...] Although lacking essays by a few prominent critical voices (Benjamin Buchloh is noticeably absent, if everywhere quoted),Isa Genzken: Retrospectiveprovides an exhaustive chronology, exhibition history, and bibliography (by Stephanie Weber). The book outlines key collaborative figures throughout the artist's career, including Buchloh, Gerhard Richter (to whom Genzken was married for just over a decade), Kai Althoff, and Wolfgang Tillmans, whose photographic portraits of the artist, particularlyIsa, dancing, from 1995, are revelatory and happily pop up in the book (as well as in Genzken's sculpture). Like the best of its genre, this catalogue makes one impatient to see the exhibition. —Prudence Peiffer