Genzken was producing sleek lacquered wood sculptures known as ‘Ellipsoids’ and ‘Hyperbolos.’ This minimalist body of work, which lasted through the early 1980s, engaged with spatial and social aspects of line, mass, scale, color and movement through and around the works.

In 1977, Michael Asher delivered small caravan trailer to the first Skulptur Projekte Münster. He had created sculpture out of experience, setting in motion his career-long project of ‘dislocation.’ In the years that followed, Asher’s interventions in galleries and museums included removing walls and doors, or keeping a museum open 24 hours a day. These deceptively simple architectural actions sought to expose the structural ‘givens’ of visual display and disrupt any sense of neutrality promised by galleries. Over a forty-year period, Genzken’s practice and Asher’s aligned in surprisingly fluid ways, despite the visual dissonance of their output. Both mined the formal tenets of sculpture, for example the base, or support structure – whether a plinth or a rolling cart for Genzken, for Asher a wall, window or even an entire city. Both artists present us with alternative (and often discomforting) environments and the critical tools to navigate contradictions around us.

"Genzken has always presented the porous messiness of personal experience alongside cleaner sculptural work that seems to give form to more universal ideas.

Genzken's (post-fucking-the-bauhaus) work is a box containing the sound of its own making. Genzken so loved by artists as a consummate "maker," a producer without pretension or ideology but whose work advocates its creation: the amassment of itself, the making of the work contained within itself, the object created, creative.  Genzken founded strategies rather than objects, an artistic down-shifting, a speed that could overtake. "the most influential living artist not because everything looks like it, but because it predicated a conglomerate speed absorbing any last vestiges of particular attention to individuated objects" i.e. When we see Genzken we react to the deployment or manipulation/alteration to its strategy, the means of attending the object rather than object itself. Weirdly deny the consumptive act of looking by permanently existing in a state of limbo that, with the rise to rule of art's image alongside the internet, allowed its acceleration to not self-deplete under an all seeing eye. See Josef Strau.

Originally a member of the Arte Povera movement, Boetti (1940–1994) quickly took a different direction of his own. From the 1970s, he specialized in colourful, playfully inventive embroideries produced for him in Afghanistan. The works seem to reflect a mysterious system in which a major role is played both by compositions featuring letters and words and by maps of the world. Thanks to former gallery holder and collector Tanya Rumpff, who has made the museum a large donation of these ‘Arazzi’, the Gemeentemuseum has instantly acquired a marvellous selection of items from Boetti’s multi-faceted oeuvre.

The works of the 1970s, when Boetti was regularly travelling to Kabul, are entirely different. During one of his first visits, it occurred to him to ask his Afghan friends to get their wives to embroider texts which he created in the first instance in the form of silkscreen prints, multiples or conceptual works. The resulting traditionally made ‘Arazzi’ (Italian for tapestries) created new opportunities for Boetti: they enabled the serial production of unique artworks of rich significance without the need for any intervention on his part.

It would be nice to be two people – one all aware and real, the other all dreamy and unconscious – who go hand in hand, without ever mingling, Melted but not confused 

 seemingly contradictory swings between the personal and the structural
beginning with its autobiographical implications and arguing from the focus on the body

Genzken once commented on there being ‘a permanent misunderstanding regarding the materials I use. I am not interested in readymades. The meaning is in the combination of things. […] I want to animate the viewers, hold up a mirror to them…’

Genzken is highly interested in the construction of things, exemplified in her early stereometric sculptures, in which she has challenged many of the preoccupations of modern sculpture and its techniques.

Isa Genzken is an exceptional artist and is, in many ways, an artist’s artist. Once she feels she is done with a group or series of works, or a certain idea, or employing a special technique, she soon gets bored and starts something new. Often Genzken’s followers are disappointed or even shocked with her new bodies of work and this slowed the time it took for Genzken’s practice to be recognized by major museums and a larger audience.