As German-Japanese artist Hito Steyerl is honored by Berlin's Academy of Arts, here's more about the first woman to have been listed as the "most influential personality in the international art world."
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11 renowned female artists based in Germany
The art world is still male-dominated, but things are changing. Here are 11 important artists you need to know.
Image: Imago/I. Kjer
Natascha Sadr Haghighian
Natascha Sadr Haghighian represented Germany at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Shown here wearing a stone mask at a press conference ahead of the art show, she went by the name of Natascha Süder Happelmann for the event. The artist, a two-time Documenta participant, often plays with the notion of identity. She created for instance a website allowing people to swap parts of each other's CVs.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/W. Kumm
Anne Imhof
Anne Imhof became the star of the 2017 Venice Biennale with her performance piece "Faust" in the German pavilion, which won her the Golden Lion award. The mammoth work dealt with the themes of power and powerlessness, arbitrary violence, resistance and freedom. She has been commissioned to recreate the piece at London's Tate Modern museum in March 2019.
Image: Imago/I. Kjer
Hito Steyerl
German-Japanese video artist Hito Steyerl represented Germany in 2015 at the Venice Biennale. She was the first woman to be ranked number one in ArtReview's "Power 100," the magazine's list of the most powerful people in the art world. Her influential work deals with surveillance, military confrontation and the entanglement of corporations.
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Rosemarie Trockel
Rosemarie Trockel gained renown through numerous international exhibitions. Her work often integrates knitted fabrics or black electric hotplates dotting colored surfaces, a reference to stereotypical depictions of the housewife and an ironic homage to the dots used by different Pop Art artists.
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Katharina Fritsch
Designed to carry statues of British historical figures, London's Trafalgar Square has a plinth at each of its four corners. Since 1999, the fourth plinth has been showcasing different works of art on a temporary basis. German sculptor Katharina Fritsch's giant blue cockerel, "Hahn / Cock," was on display there in 2013. The artist is renowned for her large-scale, monochromatic sculptures.
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Isa Genzken
A 2013 retrospective of Isa Genzken's work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York cemented the sculptor's international reputation. She had previously participated in different art shows including the Documenta and the Sculpture Projects Münster. Her early works deal with the ideals of modern architecture; since the 2000s, she has created apocalyptic installations made of cheap materials.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/J. Kalaene
Katharina Grosse
Katharina Grosse quickly gained renown with her innovative work that opens up new dimensions in painting. The Berlin-based artist's air brushed installations often submerge viewers in a chaotic space of colors. Her works are part of the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Kunsthaus in Zurich, among others.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Balk
Rebecca Horn
Rebecca Horn is a pioneering female artist in Germany: She was the first woman to become a professor at the Berlin University of Arts in 1989, as well as the first to be awarded the prestigious Goslar Kaiser Ring Award in 1992. A year later, she also became the first female artist to have a retrospective at New York's Guggenheim Museum.
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Alicja Kwade
The Berlin-based artist Alicja Kwade was born in Poland. Her installations often include stones, glass, chains, mirrors and clocks. A recent piece at the Berliner Galerie consisted of a huge clock swinging from the ceiling on a chain — a memorably hypnotic work.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/R. Vennenbernd
Katharina Sieverding
She was one of the first artists to create large-format portraits that openly featured image manipulation. Sieverding was awarded the Käthe Kollwitz Prize in 2017. Her work questions the artistic, political and social conditions behind the production and the reception of art.
Image: picture alliance/dpa/F.Gambarini
Haegue Yang
The Seoul-born Berlin-based artist has held exhibitions throughout the world. For her installations transforming everyday objects into surreal associative works, she often uses materials from the hardware store or household items. At the Documenta 13, she revealed Venetian blinds that moved on their own, making strange sounds. Haegue Yang's pieces are filled with poetry and humor.
Image: Imago/tagesspiegel/M. Wolff
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Artist Hito Steyerl, who will receive the Käthe Kollwitz Prize 2019 on Wednesday, "has succeeded in provocatively and astutely combining physical, visual and intellectual information into a single work," Berlin's Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts) jury said.
"With her montages of images from computer animations, mass media and scenes she has shot herself, the artist draws attention to current political, societal and social processes," the academy added.
The first woman to top the 'Power 100' ranking
As an artist, filmmaker and author, Hito Steyerl combines theory and practice through academic articles, performances, multimedia installations and essay documentaries.
Steyerl has been a professor of New Media Art at the Berlin University of the Arts since 2011 and the co-founder of the Research Center for Proxy Politics, a long-term research program for students.
'After the Crash,' 2010, portrays the financial crisis through an airplane graveyardImage: picture alliance/ZB/P. Förster
She gained international recognition through shows at the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015, as well as at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In 2017, Steyerl became the first woman to make it to the top of magazine ArtReview's "Power 100" ranking, up from position 7 the previous year. The list, established by a panel of 20 gallery owners, curators, museum directors and artists, ranked her as the "most influential personality in the international art world" that year.
Hito Steyerl offers five lessons in invisibility in the video 'How Not to Be Seen,' 2013Image: Hito Steyerl, Courtesy the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
From stunt woman to Wim Wenders' assistant to professor
Born in 1966 in Munich, Steyerl gained her first work experience in film as a stunt woman at the age of 16. That same year, she was expelled from school. Even though she didn't have a high school degree, she was nevertheless accepted at the Tokyo University of Arts, where she studied cinematography and documentary filmmaking from 1987 to 1990.
She then worked as Wim Wenders' assistant director on the project Until the End of the World in 1990-1991, which led her to travel to Australia, Japan, Europe and the US.
In the mid-1990s, Steyerl then resumed her studies in documentary filmmaking, but this time at the University of Television and Film in Munich.
Her early documentaries — Deutschland und das Ich (Germany and the Ego), Land des Lächelns (Land of Smiles), Babenhausen and Normality 1-0 from 1994-1999 — dealt with anti-Semitism, racism and neo-Nazism.
After obtaining a PhD in philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2003, she worked at the Center for Culture Studies at Goldsmith College in London and was also a guest professor at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen and the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki.
A radical stance
Steyerl's work deals with social issues such as post-colonialism, feminism and globalization, reflecting on today's uninterrupted flow of images and information.
In her short documentary November (2004), Steyerl used footage from a feminist martial arts film she had shot with a Super 8 camera in the 1980s. In the film, her best friend, Andrea Wolf, played the role of a fighter. In the 1990s, Wolf joined the Kurdish PKK militant organization and became a fighter in real life. Killed in 1998, Wolf has since been revered as revolutionary martyr in Kurdistan. In November, Steyerl reflects on the changing meaning of terms such as revolution, feminism, internationalism and terrorism.
An immersive video installation criticizing capitalism: 'Factory of the Sun,' 2015 Image: picture-alliance/dpa/F. Hörhager
Factory of the Sun, shown at the German pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2015, is an immersive video installation that blurs the lines between game and reality. The video installation portrays a Euro pop, turbo-capitalist world in which Germany has been replaced by Deutsche Bank. Participants are forced laborers whose movements are converted into sunlight. The Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper described it as "evil, insane and radically contemporary."
The Käthe Kollwitz Prize has been awarded to artists since 1960 and is endowed with €12,000 ($13,600). Following the awards ceremony, an exhibition of Hito Steyerl's work will be shown at Berlin's Akademie der Künste from February 21 to April 14. It will include the 2016 installation Hell Yeah We F*** Die.
Her latest work is also currently on show at the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, where the exhibition "The City of Broken Windows" is held through June 30, 2019.
