NEW YORK, NY.- Rebecca Horn, an artist who channeled theatrical flair, a distinctive if paradoxically self-serious sense of humor and an undertone of dread into sculpture, performance, drawing, poetry and film, died Sept. 6 at her home in Bad König, Germany. She was 80.

Her gallerist in New York, Sean Kelly, confirmed her death, saying her health had been in decline since she had a stroke in 2015.

One of Horn’s best-known pieces was “Einhorn,” or “Unicorn” (1970), which she conceived while she was at art school in Hamburg. At once a sculpture, a costume, a performance and, perhaps not least, a jokey but suggestive play on the artist’s own name, it comprised a straight white wooden horn with a flared base connected to a white fabric harness. Horn once persuaded a tall female classmate to spend the day walking through the countryside wearing the horn and harness and nothing else.

In an interview that appeared in the catalog for her 1993 survey at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Horn recalled that two hunters passing by the performance on bicycles “literally fell off in disbelief.”

After “Unicorn,” Horn made other surreal, unnerving body-modification sculptures, like a pair of extended balsa-wood “Finger Gloves”; masks made of feathers; and a BDSM-style mask covered in pencils. She made kinetic sculptures, like an apparently exploding upside-down piano (“Concert for Anarchy”); directed feature films, including a comedy, starring Donald Sutherland, about a woman obsessed with Buster Keaton (“Buster’s Bedroom,” 1991); produced stylish constructions of mirrors and twigs; and made wistful, abstract mixed-media drawings.

In 1987, when she was commissioned to make an artwork in Münster, in northwest Germany, Horn took over a brick tower that had been used by the Gestapo as a torture chamber during World War II and installed 40 mechanized silver hammers that, in her words, banged on the walls “like a communication from the past.”

Just a brief list of her titles suggests her sensibility: “Pendulum With Emu Egg,” “Overflowing Blood Machine,” “Kiss of the Rhinoceros.”

But “Unicorn,” with its unique convergence of elements, may be the best summation of her practice. At once whimsical and vulnerable, the performance was a keen distillation of what it means to be alive, to flirt with magic in the ever-present shadow of cruelty and death. But the symbolism of a nearly naked woman with a phallic stick on her head, potent as it is, didn’t represent anything in particular so much as it evoked an experience — the experience of being half-awake, poised between intention and instinct.

In one sense, everything Horn made was an exploration of this mysterious terrain at the borderline of consciousness, where actions meet objects and the human shades into the mechanical. In another sense, her drawings, films and especially sculptures were all, really, conceptual pieces — so many elaborate illustrations of mordant punchlines.

Reviewing Horn’s 1990 show, “Diving Through Buster’s Bedroom,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles — her first substantial introduction to an American public — Michael Brenson of The New York Times counted her among the postwar German artists “whose work throbs with the memory of Nazi cruelty and torture,” but added that she was probably the only one “whose shows sometimes seem like stand-up comedy acts.”

Rebecca Horn was born on March 24, 1944, in Michelstadt, Germany, about an hour south of Frankfurt, to Ernst and Margarethe Horn. She had several older siblings but apparently has no survivors.

Her parents owned a small complex of textile factories in nearby Bad König, which Horn later converted into studio and exhibition spaces. Her father worked abroad, and when she wasn’t in boarding school she lived with an aunt.

Horn wasn’t typically forthcoming about her personal life. “When I am asked for my biography and data,” she explained in the Guggenheim catalog, “I always say, ‘R. Horn is traveling.’”

Asked how she got started, she mentioned “an uncle who was a painter and seemed to live a very exotic and colorful life” and a Romanian governess who taught her to draw.

Horn briefly studied economics before enrolling, much to her father’s disapproval, at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg.

In about 1967, while making large sculptures out of polyester and fiberglass — which is dangerous when inhaled — without wearing a mask, Horn injured her lungs so severely that she had to spend a year in a sanitarium. She had pulmonary problems for the rest of her life.

It was while recuperating that she became interested in the artistic possibilities of the human body and began sewing costumes. Back at school, she continued in this direction, constructing quasi-armatures that let her communicate expressively while obstructing real contact with other people.

After a year at Central Saint Martins, part of the University of the Arts London, Horn moved to the United States, where she spent time in both Los Angeles and New York. She lived in Paris in the 1990s, and for two decades, beginning in 1989, she taught at the Berlin University of the Arts.

In 1972, Horn was the youngest artist in the fifth of renowned curator Harald Szeemann’s Documenta exhibitions, in Kassel, Germany, and her work appeared in several subsequent editions of the festival as well as in the Venice Biennale four times. A retrospective of her work is currently on display at the Haus der Kunst in Munich.

Among other prizes, Horn was presented in 2010 with a Praemium Imperiale, an annual international art award bestowed by the Japan Art Association in Tokyo.

From the beginning, Horn’s drawings were at the foundation of her artistic practice, but after her stroke, which affected her right side, she could no longer draw. Still, she continued to conceive of sculptures and to direct her studio assistants, and maybe that was enough.

“Let’s say you have this little painting machine, where the brushes dip into the paint, then tremble and splash paint everywhere around them,” she said in one of her Guggenheim interviews. “For me, it’s the act of painting that’s important, not the machine.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.