Rebecca Horn - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Rebecca Horn was born on March 23, 1944 in Michelstadt, Germany. She was taught to draw by her Romanian governess and became obsessed with drawing with expression because it was not as confining or labeling as oral language. Living in Germany after the end of World War II greatly affected the liking she took to drawing. "We could not speak German. Germans were hated. We had to learn French and English. We were always traveling somewhere else, speaking something else. But I had a Romanian governess who taught me how to draw. I did not have to draw in German or French or English. I could just draw."

Horn spent most of her late childhood in boarding schools and at nineteen rebelled against her parents' plan of studying economics and decided to instead attend Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts. A year later she had to pull out of art school because she had contracted severe lung poisoning. 'In 1964 I was 20 years old and living in Barcelona, in one of those hotels where you rent rooms by the hour. I was working with glass fibre, without a mask, because nobody said it was dangerous, and I got very sick. For a year I was in a sanatorium. My parents died. I was totally isolated.” After experiencing this “total isolation” until she felt that her life was over before it had begun, she walked out of the hospital. She was still too ill, however, to resume life as a student or work with fiberglass and polyester. She had to take masses of antibiotics and sleep long hours to have enough energy to operate normally. She could, however, work with softer materials, and when in bed she drew with colored pencils (which are still her favorite drawing tools). She also began to slowly break out of her self-imposed isolation and began to create sculpture and strange extensions with balsa wood and cloth. “I began to produce my first body-sculptures. I could sew lying in bed." Her goal then was to quash her “loneliness by communicating through bodily forms.”

Horn lived in Hamburg until 1971, in London for a brief time (1971–2), and since 1973 in Berlin.