Exhibited in Isa Genzken’s first mid-career exhibition, Everybody Needs At Least One Window at The Renaissance Society in Chicago, X from 1992 is an important work belonging to her first body of large-scale epoxy sculptures. Alluding to Chicago and the city’s rich architectural heritage as the birthplace of the skyscraper, the ‘X’ shape of the present work mirrors the iconic bracing of the John Hancock Centre, while other works from this series such as Fenster (Window) are inspired by rounded bay windows popular in older Chicago buildings. In preparation for this exhibition, Genzken began to translate the formal motifs she had established in her MLR paintings – windows, lamps, and the X as a structural element in architecture – into sculpture. The ‘X’ form is a distinctive and recurring motif in Genzken’s oeuvre, not only from her MLR paintings but also in her other sculptural works such as the concrete X installed in Nibelungenhalle, Munich in 1994. A work of great significance in the artist’s sculptural oeuvre, the present work has been exhibited in major retrospectives of the artist including the 1996 exhibition MetLife. Isa Genzken in Generali Foundation, Vienna and the artist’s largest exhibition, Isa Genzken: Retrospective in 2013-2015 which travelled to The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and The Dallas Museum of Art.

Genzken was born in the small northern German city of Bad Oldesloe in 1948, and grew up in Hamburg and Berlin where she first began to study art. After studying in Hamburg and Berlin, Genzken transferred to Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, Germany’s leading art school at the time. The art scene in Dusseldorf during the 1980s was diverse and flourishing, with the prominence of Joseph Beuys, Hilla and Bernd Becher, Blinky Palermo, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter working across a range of media such as painting, sculpture, photography and performance. At age 27, when she had one year left in her studies, she met Konrad Fischer, with whom she had her first solo presentation, making Genzken the youngest female artist to have a solo exhibition at the influential Dusseldorf gallery.

Growing up in the aftermath of the Second World War, Genzken was fascinated by the destruction and construction of cities, a preoccupation that translates to her artistic focus on architectural forms and the aesthetic of ruins. As opposed to traditional fine art media, Genzken employed materials found in construction sites or industrial factories such as concrete, steel and epoxy – materials which constitute the foundational structures of modern life. Initially working with concrete sculptures which mirrored the architectural remnants of destroyed buildings, Genzken transitioned to lighter, translucent epoxy in the early 1990s, a material that came to dominate her sculptural output of this decade. Using it raw in its natural, translucent pale yellow or dying it green or red, Genzken channels the unique way in which the material illuminates and embodies a sense of lightness which differentiates this body of epoxy works from the heaviness of concrete. Using epoxy also made visible the internal armature, isolating the structural element of architecture and presenting its sculptural potential. By their nature, buildings are inherently sculptural – bound by gravity, yet through their engineering construction they aim to extend beyond the rules that bind them. Occupying an enclosed cubic space, Genzken mobilizes the viewer’s gaze; these sculptures are experienced and activated by the viewer’s own movements within the work's surrounding space. In this way, Genzken facilitates a dialogue with the built world and our urban environment, a central concern throughout the artist’s wider oeuvre.

Retaining an appreciation for architectural form, for narrative subject matter, and for sculpture that has a social dimension, Genzken forged a new sculptural language in the 1990s. Although Genzken acknowledges the influence of American and German minimalist artists such as Carl Andre and Blinky Palmero on her early work, Genzken’s visual language aims to recall objects in the real world, even in her most abstract works. She told Diedrich Diederischen, “it was exactly this ‘content’ that I wanted to bring back to the Ellipsoids so that people would say, ‘it looks like a spear.’ Or a toothpick, or a boat…This associative aspect was there from the very beginning and also intentional...” (Isa Genzken quoted in: Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art (and travelling), Isa Genzken: Retrospective, 2013, p. 134). Genzken's straightforward and unsentimental reaction to the devastation of war and its destruction not only addressed a generation of younger artists but also defined a period of contemporary visual culture.