Isa Genzken: VACATION is on view at David Zwirner, Walker Street, New York, from March 13 through April 18, 2026. Curated by Ebony L. Haynes, the exhibition brings together a focused selection of works by Berlin-based artist Isa Genzken, spanning the late 1970s to the 2010s. Installed in the gallery’s Tribeca space, the presentation functions as both pause and provocation, echoing Genzken’s pointed declaration that the art system itself is in need of a holiday.
Over more than five decades, Genzken has forged a practice that moves restlessly between sculpture, photography, film, and installation. Her early concrete forms from the 1980s, several of which appear here, read like fragments of modernist architecture—columns, towers, and skeletal structures that seem at once utopian and precarious. These works established her long-standing engagement with the built environment, a theme that would evolve into complex reflections on globalization, consumer culture, and the psychological texture of contemporary life. The exhibition also includes examples from her
Weltempfänger (World Receiver) series, sculptures that evoke antennae or communication devices, suggesting both connection and overload in an age saturated with signals.
VACATION further highlights lesser-seen film and photographic works, alongside collaborations with figures such as Wolfgang Tillmans and Kai Althoff. Across mediums, Genzken tests the boundaries between refinement and improvisation, permanence and collapse. Everyday materials—mirrors, mannequins, concrete, found objects—are reassembled into charged constellations that resist easy interpretation. Her work draws equally from the legacy of twentieth-century avant-garde experimentation and the visual noise of the twenty-first century.
This marks the gallery’s sixth solo presentation of Genzken’s work since 2004 and follows significant institutional recognition, including a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. With
VACATION, Genzken does not retreat from critique; rather, she reframes it. The exhibition offers viewers a space to reconsider the systems that shape perception itself, inviting reflection on what it might mean—personally and collectively—to step back and see anew.
Image:
Isa Genzken, Yachturlaub, 1993 (detail) © Isa Genzken. Courtesy of the David Zwirner Gallery