When asked when she knew she wanted to be an artist, Isa Genzken replied, “It was very, very early, if I remember correctly, when I was still in the body of my mother.”

Genzken had a knack for hating the press, so there is a very good chance that she was messing with them. But that’s the fun part about Isa Genzken - you never know what she’ll do or say. This is fun for spectators of her work, like us and a living nightmare for pretty much everyone else who knew her.

Born in 1948 in Bad Oldesloe, which appropriately sounds like “bad, old, n’ slow,” Isa was the daughter of “two art freaks” and the granddaughter of Karl Genzken, the Nazi doctor who was responsible for the medical experiments performed on inmates of concentration camps. And on top of all of this, Isa was bipolar and an alcoholic. So naturally she would become an artist. She grew up being encouraged to draw by both her father, a medical student who wanted to be an opera singer, and her mother, a pharmaceutical company assistant who wanted to be an actress. Classic projecting your aspirations onto your children, am I right? But it worked, Isa attended the Hamburg University of Fine Arts, the Berlin University of the Arts, and Arts Academy Dusseldorf, where her future husband Gerhard Richter was teaching.

Gerhard and Isa’s relationship was marked by alcoholism and political debate (Genzken knew the German terrorist Andreas Baader) and ultimately ended in divorce. During this time she also befriended an alcoholic doctor who allowed her to X-ray her head while she drank, smoked and laughed, which was very cool and very unsafe. Throughout Genzken’s life, her mental illness and alcoholism have been the cause of “periods of sleeping on the streets, of ejections from hotels and restaurants, and of losing friends and galleries.” In the summer of 2013 she fell and fractured her skull, an injury which has ironically stabilized her mood but made it incredibly hard for her to create anything. But provided she hasn’t mutated too much of her DNA via irresponsible X-rays, she’ll be back and better than ever.