[6][7] Living in Germany after the end of World War II greatly affected the liking she took to drawing.

"[8] After leaving the sanatorium Horn began using soft materials, creating sculptures informed by her illness and long convalescence.

She walks through a field and forest on a summer morning wearing only a white horn protruding directly from the front of the top of her head, held there by straps.

When moving her face back and forth on a near a wall the pencil marks that are made correspond directly with her movements.

In this piece, the finger extension gloves she created were longer, measured to specifically fit the performance space.

Horn described the effect: "It is as if one hand had suddenly become disconnected from the other like two utterly unrelated beings.

Many of her feathered pieces wrap a figure in the manner of a cocoon, or function as masks or fans, to cover or imprison the body.

Horn layered 40 metre long walls of ashes behind glass, as archives of petrifaction.

[35] At the same time, the theme of bodily vitality, which she had been exploring since the 1970s, was developed in site-specific art installations that investigated the subject of the latent energy of places and the magnetic flows of space.

This cycle comprises High Moon, New York (1991), El Reio de la Luna, Barcelona (1992) and Spirit di Madreperla, Naples (2002).

[36] For the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Horn was commissioned to create the steel sculpture L'Estel Ferit.

One would think that a large tinted lens exists for protection and cover, but it also has the effect of drawing attention to the person or figure behind it.

The work sets up interactions between viewers, environment and sculpture as it uses binoculars and mirrors to suggest the passive and active energies.

[40] For Buster's Bedroom[41] und Roussel, she collaborated with German writer Martin Mosebach on the respective screenplays.

[42] A number of Horn's mechanised sculptures appeared in her films, notably The Feathered Prison Fan (1978)—covered in large overlapping fans that is big enough to enclose an adult inside—in Der Eintänzer and The Peacock Machine (1979–80), another sculpture that folds and unfolds white peacock plumage in La Ferdinanda.

[43] When Harald Szeemann invited Horn to participate in the 1972 Documenta in Kassel, she was a virtually unknown twenty-eight-year-old artist.

Her solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, "Rebecca Horn: Diving through Buster's Bedroom", featured 18 large-scale mechanized sculptures that related to the themes and content from her feature-length film, Buster's Bedroom.

[45] In 1993 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, mounted a mid-career retrospective organized by Germano Celant and Nancy Spector, which traveled to the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Tate Gallery and Serpentine Gallery, London; and Musée de Grenoble.

[46] Horn was honoured with museum exhibitions in Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, New Delhi and Moscow.

[47][50] After her teaching career ended, she worked out of a studio in her grandfather's former textile factory in Bad König.

[62] In 1992, Horn became the first woman to receive the prestigious Goslarer Kaiserring, and was awarded the Medienkunstpreis Karlsruhe for achievements in technology and art.

[1] She was later awarded the 2010 Praemium Imperiale in Sculpture and the Grande Médaille des Arts Plastiques 2011 from the Académie d'Architecture de Paris.