Director, Glenn Lowry: In the 1980s, Genzken turned her attention to working with concrete, a material that she borrowed from architecture. Sabine Breitwieser.
Curator, Sabine Breitwieser: Using concrete as a material made her start a deeper examination of architecture as a basic statement made by engineers rather than by fashionable architects.
Each layer was created over the day and could dry over the night, and step-by-step the artist was casting her work. Similar to some of the plaster works, one can still see traces of the making of the material and the forms the artist used when casting them. What is also visible is that these sculptures are made in parts; in dimensions the artist was able to handle by herself in the studio.
Glenn Lowry: When cast at a small scale, concrete is actually quite fragile.
Sabine Breitwieser: And the works can easily break, especially when often reassembled. However, this ruin-like esthetic is something the artist is welcoming and even underlining.
Glenn Lowry: Genzken has had a career-long interest in modernist architecture.
Sabine Breitwieser: This resembles the architecture in German cities that largely were rebuilt after the war in the typical architecture of the 1960s made out of concrete, a type of architecture much in controversy in relation to utopian ideas of modernity.