Alexandra Bircken started out in fashion but ended up making art out of everything from carved-up car engines to gimp suits and bits of her body. The German artist reveals how her fascinations began
Alexandra Bircken likes to open things up and have a good tinker with their insides. In her current show in London, she cut the V10 engine from an Audi RS 6 into six imposing slices, or rather she got a man in Stuttgart with a massive bandsaw to do it. “These were once crazy, speedy machines,” Bircken says. But cleaned of oil and sliced up like a loaf, the engine has been stilled. Can those chains, wheels and axles really have propelled passengers so far and so fast? And what does it mean when a mechanism no longer works?
It’s a question posed by the show, which Bircken has named Gebrochenes Pferd, German for Broken Horse. The central sculpture is a toy horse painted black, with a tail of silver LED wires. It has been cut into two halves joined by a hinge, so it lies collapsed on the floor. “I often refer to the motorbikes I use in my work as modern horses,” Bircken says – and indeed, in another room, there is a BMW motorbike with its back half removed. “They’re so much to do with speed and dominance and acceleration,” she continues. “So it felt kind of fitting to put a stop to this. Because the times that we are in, all that is crumbling.”
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