Rebecca Horn
Handschuhfinger

1973

EB37

Balsa wood, black canvas in canvas box
Length 90 cm

Edition of 10 + 4 AP, signed and numbered

out of stock

Multiple by Rebecca Horn. An opened black canvas box. Inside are the glove fingers, 5 long, tapered wooden sticks covered in black linen, which can be attached to the hand with a black ribbon as an extension of the fingers. There is a second one underneath the box.

Black and white photo shows the artist Rebecca Horn picking up a cloth from the floor with her strapped on gloved fingers.

In March 1973, Galerie Block presented the artist’s first solo exhibition, Körperraum (Body Space), and in the same year she created the edition Handschuhfinger (Glove Fingers) – an action object intended for use.
The edition Handschuhfinger consists of a pair of gloves that can be worn like a prosthesis and extend the fingers of the hands considerably. Made of black linen and long balsa wood sticks, the gloves are available in two sizes for “male/female hands,” as the edition sheet explains, and are attached to the wrist with black linen strips so that the wearer/performer can move the “fingers” of the object. In a short text from 1972, the artist describes how this artificial body extension changes the wearer’s sensitivity and perception of the surrounding space:
“The Handschuhfinger are made of such light material that I can move my fingers without effort. I feel, touch, and grasp with them, maintaining a fixed distance from the objects I touch. The lever movement of the extended fingers enhances the sense of touch in the hand. I feel how I touch, see how I grasp, and control the distances between the objects and myself at a distance of my own choosing.”¹
The object Handschuhfinger is one of a series of body extensions that Rebecca Horn has been creating since the late 1960s for the head or arms, combining sculptural elements and performance. The 1973 film documentary_ Performances II_ (16 mm, color, sound, 36 min) shows how the artist explores space and her surroundings with these prosthetic objects in nine individual sequences, each dedicated to a body sculpture and its specific possibilities for action and experience. In the approximately five-minute recording of a performance with glove fingers, the artist can be seen using her extremely elongated fingers to feel the floor of a room and the back of a naked body lying in it. The object Handschuhfinger appears in an edition of 10 in a dark gray canvas box, which is numbered and signed on the inside of the lid.
BE

¹ Rebecca Horn, »Handschuhfinger, 1972«, in: Rebecca Horn. The Glance of Infinity, publ. by Carl Haenlein, Exhib. cat., Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover; Zürich, Berlin, New York 1997, Vol. 1/II, p. 58.