Since the late 1960s, her visionary, transmedia work has poetically and sensually explored the theme of existence, blurring the boundaries between art and nature, body, environment and machine, as well as the human and non-human. The development of her artistic oeuvre can be traced in exemplary fashion on the basis of her four documenta participations between 1972 and 1992.

In 1972, Harald Szeemann was the first curator to show Horn's work: Enthused by her cinematically and photographically documented performance “Unicorn” (1970), he invited the then 28-year-old to participate in documenta 5: she was represented in the “Individual Mythologies” section (subsection “Self-Representation”) with a “head extension” typical of this phase of her work: In a one-off action, a male performer carried an oversized construction, with a five-meter-high pole wrapped in black fabric on his head, while he was slowly led across the Karlswiese in front of the Orangerie by Horn and three other participants on four long lines.     

Five years later, Horn is represented with the performative sculpture “Paradise Widow” (1975): an upright cocoon-like construction made of black cock feathers, the proportions of which are adapted to the body of a woman. The video recording of the activated sculpture was shown on two screens during the exhibition. The slow opening and closing of the mysterious structure reveals/veils the body of an naked woman.

As part of documenta 7, Rudi Fuchs staged Rebecca Horn's “Bleistiftmaske” (1972) in the rotunda of the Museum Fridericianum as a counterpoint to Hanne Darboven's cycle “Vierjahreszeiten” (1981). The real sensation that year, however, was her newly developed “Peacock Machine” (1982), which marked both a milestone and a turning point in her artistic work: Further developing the early performances, apparatuses and body extensions, kinetic animated machine sculptures henceforth became the unmistakable protagonists of her art. As a zoomorphic machine creature, the motorized “peacock machine” inside the white temple on the (temporarily accessible) Swan Island turned its fan-shaped wheel in a perpetual courtship ritual. A choreographed spectacle in which tenderness, strangeness, attraction and aloofness intertwined.

In 1992, Rebecca Horn took part in documenta for the last time: her site-specific installation “The Moon, the Child, the Anarchic River” in Dock4 - a former school building that now houses the documenta archiv - consisted of several school desks attached upside down to the ceiling, dripping ink and a network of lead pipes that reached down the façade like roots over all three floors into the courtyard.

In addition to numerous other international awards, Rebecca Horn has been honored with the Praemium Imperiale (2010) established by the Japanese Imperial Family, the Goslar Kaiserring (1992) and the Kassel Arnold Bode Prize (1986).