Director, Glenn Lowry: Michael Darling, the James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
Curator, Michael Darling: This photograph, Ear, is from a series of photographs that Isa Genzken made in 1980 – in New York, photographing both friends of hers and women she encountered on the street. And as you can see, she's blown it up to monumental scale, so this picture of an ear becomes as much a sculptural study as an actual portrait of someone. This one I think is also quite unique in that it actually is a portrait of Isa Genzken's own ear.
Glenn Lowry: In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Genzken typically exhibited her Ear photographs with Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos, and with her readymade sculpture Weltempfänger, the radio that you see in this gallery.
Michael Darling: I think the combination of these three types of work shows an early interest on Genzken's part in mixing different media and not being beholden to one particular type of practice or type of tradition.
Glenn Lowry: Genzken was very interested in engineering and sound when she created her ear pieces and hi-fi photos, also on view here.
Michael Darling: I personally think that there's something of interest here, too, in the intangible quality of sound as it moves through space that she was interested in, where sculpture and art, for that matter, might exist in ways that are harder to perceive visually and might actually be most perceptible in an aural realm.