Using commercial material, the sculptures of German artist Isa Genzken explore the tension between performance and transience. Blending a strong conceptual approach with personal themes, many of Genzken's works prove to be traces of her own existence. Her practice draws on the legacies of Constructivism and Minimalism, often involving a critical dialogue with Modernist architecture. Genzken's works comment on the way we build and destroy our environments while raising questions concerning the very nature of human existence. Her practice is an expression of hope and a simultaneous monument to human consumption and destructiveness.

- Empire Vampire V, 2005
is part of an extensive series of works inspired by the 9/11 terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. The work explores both, the artist's personal experience of that dramatic moment and the social aspect of such a collective trauma. Reflecting Genzken's shift in her artistic vocabulary toward collage and sculptural assemblage, the piece echoes Genzken's interest and experience with film, namely regarding the possibilities inherent in the juxtaposition of images and objects. Composed from a mix of a 99-cent shop aesthetic, Genzken brings together cheap plastic toys with spray paint, wood, and plastic elements, carefully arranged into a semi theatrical setting, and placed on a sleek museum-like wooden pedestal. The work explores relations between seemingly opposed objects, materials, symbols, representations, and images, united through their direct or indirect ties to the globalized, violent and unjust world, characteristic for our present-day human condition. The dystopic yet increasingly familiar nature of the work's aesthetic is a silent monument to the disposable culture built around the consumption of cheap goods and the economic underpinnings of contemporary violence.

MC