Isa Genzken: A Half Century of Prolific, Innovative Art and Openness on Bipolar Symptoms

“She has always courted danger, with predictable results—the life force and the death wish are at odds in her.” - Judith Thurman on Isa Genzken

“I always wanted to have the courage to do totally crazy, impossible, and also wrong things.” -Isa Genzken

Genzken’s “X-Ray” (1991). The New Yorker.

Isa Genzken is notorious for not giving many interviews about her work or her personal life. Despite that, she has been transparent with the interested public about her diagnosis of bipolar depression as well as her struggles with alcohol, a transparency that began relatively recently. Leigh Arnold, associate curator at the Nasher Sculpture Center, which awarded Genzken their 2019 laureate prize, notes that Genzken’s bipolar disorder went unrecognized for years because the symptoms may have been less pronounced but also masked by drug and alcohol problems. Indeed, bipolar depression and troubles with alcohol and substance use often go hand-in-hand. The exact link isn’t entirely known, but comorbidity of the two is high, higher than alcoholism among people with unipolar depression. Theories about the relationship include that people drink to self-medicate their bipolar symptoms, that the withdrawal from alcohol triggers brain chemistry to crave drinking, that it’s part of the recklessness of mania, or, more likely, that there’s a complex bi-directional relationship between the two that is so nuanced that we can’t quite understand where one ends and the other begins.

While the alcoholism was more visible, the bipolar depression was always there. Writer Judith Thurman says of Genzken,

“She has always courted danger, with predictable results—the life force and the death wish are at odds in her.”

While this is not a direct statement about the artist’s illness, it is a solid description of bipolar disorder, with its periods of manic exhilaration offset by spells of dark depression. This reference is far from the only one that people have made to the artist putting herself in danger. Curator Sabine Breitwieser notes that Genzken, “takes a lot of risks and puts herself in extreme situations in her art as well as in her life,” a description similar to characterizations of Diane Arbus.