Isa Genzken: World Receiver

Isa Genzken’s 16-meter-tall sculpture Vollmond has been standing in front of Den Frie for nearly a year as an inscrutable moon antenna, receiving the energies of the city. World Receiver brings together further landmark works from the German artist’s production over the past decades, foregrounding a consistently world-facing practice whose formal and material inventiveness has positioned her as one of the most influential artists of her generation.

The exhibition is anchored in Genzken’s work with assemblage, in which she playfully yet incisively brings together everyday materials, utilitarian objects, luxury products, photographs, and text fragments. Her works function as seismographs, registering and absorbing cultural displacements. Here, punk and posh meet in a gaze that is both critical and filled with love for the commercialised and mediated reality that shapes our present. Beneath the bright colours and glittering surfaces, however, lurk the destructive forces of contemporary life—consumer culture, war, and inequality. And yet, Isa Genzken’s ambiguous works ultimately remain fundamentally open and hopeful in their orientation toward the future, no matter how weird it may become.

Isa Genzken represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and has had numerous major exhibitions, including a large retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2013. At Den Frie, she has previously participated in the group exhibitions Becoming Animal (2018) and Another Surrealism (2022). World Receiver is her first institutional solo exhibition in Scandinavia.