The fragile balance of chaos and harmony in Rebecca Horn’s mechanical worlds

The current Rebecca Horn exhibition, Emotion in Motion at Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden in Wuppertal, explores the artist’s extraordinary universe, where movement, sound, mechanics, and poetry exist in constant exchange. Open from March 14th to August 30th, 2026, the retrospective brings together large-scale installations and kinetic sculptures spanning four decades, offering a rare glimpse into the visionary language of Rebecca Horn’s artworks.

Developed in collaboration with the Moontower Foundation, established by Rebecca Horn in 2007 to preserve her artistic legacy, the exhibition features thirteen major works from the 1980s to the 2010s. The selection highlights her enduring fascination with the connections between the human body, technology, emotion, and the unseen forces shaping human experience.

Among the key works is Concert of Anarchy (2006), one of Rebecca Horn’s most celebrated kinetic installations. A grand piano suspended upside down from the ceiling releases and retracts its keyboard through pneumatic mechanisms, turning a familiar cultural object into a surreal spectacle of destruction, repetition, and fragile balance between order and chaos.

Rebecca Horn’s artworks: between body, space, and imagination

Across her six-decade career, Rebecca Horn created a distinctive artistic language spanning sculpture, performance, film, drawing, poetry, and installation. Her early Body Extensions explored physical limitation and vulnerability, using wearable structures and mechanical devices to examine desire, isolation, connection, and the imagination of the body.

The exhibition features several defining Horn artworks that reveal her fascination with movement and symbolism. Tower of the Nameless (1994), created in response to the war in Yugoslavia, combines stacked fruit ladders with motorised violins, reflecting on displacement, memory, and the restorative power of music inspired by refugee performances in Vienna.

In Painting Machine (1999), Horn explores the relationship between mechanism and gesture as a device rhythmically sprays black ink across a wall, creating compositions that exist between control and chance. Prussian Bride Machine (1988) continues her dialogue with Surrealism and the readymade, using mechanical processes to evoke questions of identity and desire.

A legacy of movement and emotion

The exhibition also includes Breathing Bodies (2017), where delicate brass rods create a subtle choreography of mechanical motion, and Kiss of the Rhinoceros (1989), a kinetic sculpture exploring the tension between aggression and tenderness through two metallic rhinoceros forms that emit flashes of light upon contact.

Throughout her practice, Rebecca Horn gave machines an expressive, almost organic presence. Her sculptures move, respond, and communicate, revealing the emotional possibilities hidden within mechanical systems. Emotion in Motion celebrates an artist who challenged the boundaries between body and object, reality and imagination, creating a poetic world where technology becomes a language of human emotion.