Transforming personal experience into a visual narrative, this work offers an emotionally profound exploration that captivates the viewer. Its immersive quality encourages repeated engagement, making it a unique and beguiling addition to the realm of visual art.
Exploring identity and difference, this collection features 406 drawings and various media created by Roni Horn over fourteen months. It captures the complexity of daily life amid significant events, including the onset of a global pandemic and political turmoil. The work blends humor, strangeness, and profound emotion, showcasing casual commentaries, collages, and original texts. With themes of nature and changing weather, it offers an immersive visual experience that invites multiple viewings, first exhibited in New York City in early 2021.
Your life is a rare form of transparency through which I have observed the world becoming more present to itself and through which I have become more present to myself. Roni Horn, An Uncountable Infinity (for Felix Gonzalez-Torres), 1996 In 1990 Félix González-Torres encountered an artwork by Roni Horn called Gold Field (1980/82), a simple sheet of gold foil placed on the floor of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. González-Torres was deeply moved and wrote to Horn, beginning an exchange between the artists that would last until González-Torres' passing in 1996. Félix González-Torres Roni Horn was created as a photographic essay with the intention of sharing the experiential qualities of the artists' work and the profound relationships underlying it. It explores four iconic works (among others)-"Untitled" (For Stockholm) (1992) and "Untitled" (Blood) (1992) by González-Torres, and Well and Truly (2009-10) and a.k.a. (2008-09) by Horn-and emphasizes notions of doubling, duality, repetition, and identity. Images of these pieces, taken on the occasion of a 2022 exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce-Pinault Collection in Paris, reveal both artists' radical visual vocabularies, as well their shared passion for language, writing and poetry. Their intention emerges as two-fold: to create a tension between artist, viewer and object; and to grasp the inexpressible, the immeasurable.
In her artist's book 82 Postcards, Roni Horn (born 1955) takes the titular medium and classifies its photographs, designs and text in a unique system of symbols and visual codes. Her translation of these mementos--mostly from North America, but some from farther afield--lays bare the interplay of their various parts, questioning how pieces of content come together to form the basis of complex cultural phenomena like tourist attractions, popular science and national identity.
"Roni Horn (b. 1955) is a prominent contemporary artist known for her sculptures, photography, and installations inspired by landscape and the natural world, and especially the isolated landscapes of Iceland, where she has travelled and lived for substantial periods of time since the early 1970s. Horn's work explores geology and climate; the interplay of nature, art, and place; and the relationships between words, appearance, androgyny, and the self. Horn is author of more than twenty books and artist's books, and is herself the subject of more than thirty books and exhibition catalogs, including a survey published by Phaidon and many by Steidl. Examples of her work include You Are the Weather (1994-96), a series of photographs of a young woman bathing in Icelandic hot springs; Pair Objects (1988), identical metal sculptures placed in two different locations; and the installation Library of Water (2007) in Iceland, with columns that enclose water from melting glaciers. Horn is arguably the most important visual chronicler of the landscape of Iceland. Upon graduating from her MFA program at Yale, she traveled to Iceland, journeying across its interior on a motorcycle. Over thirty years, she has continually returned to Iceland to explore and record the astonishing beauty of its geology, climate, and culture. This book will contain a range of texts, from evocative vignettes to illustrated essays written for Iceland's most widely-read newspaper. A combination of artists' writings and travelogue, the texts reveal Iceland as one of Horne's most important influences and inspirations, and record a unique and beautiful environment undergoing climate change"-- Provided by publisher
Remembered Words, A Specimen Concordance alphabetizes and enumerates all the words used in the 370 drawings made for Roni Horn’s series “Remembered Words” (2012–13). Remembering or recalling words, words picked from a life, from experience. Used words that played a role for moments or for years. Words recollected without thoughtful preference or hierarchy. But the words one uses or takes note of sneak the author’s vanity, humor, history, culture and psychology in with them.
Dog’s Chorus presents an important group of recent drawings by Roni Horn. Following up on the 2016 Th Rose Prblm, Horn cuts apart original drawings of texts and reassembles the fragments into compositions that are cumulative, complex and changeable. In Dog’s Chorus Horn combines a line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar with common idioms, playfully questioning the meanings of language and identity.
„A drawing in the Th Rose Prblm cuts together two drawings. Each with one of two phrases. Composing these two phrases in their various iterations: “Rose is a rose is a rose” or “a rose is a rose is a rose” with “come up smelling like roses” or “coming up smelling like a rose”, etc. leads to all kinds of nonsense. But it also leads to another sense. I found a lot of humor here, some of it pretty dumb. Composing these phrases into all the possible outcomes became a metaphor for identity. There are 48 drawings and it’s one work. Cumulatively the shades of meaning obtain a complexity and range that stand in for the mutable, changeable nature of identity. I also found that the more I did the more there was.“ Roni Horn
The Selected Gifts (1974–2015) is a collection of photographs documenting the history of gifts received over the course of the artist’s life. Collected together in this book they form a possible self-portrait.
Hack Wit is a playful and complex body of work developed between 2013 and 2015, using clichés or proverbs and watercolor. For each work, the artist made two watercolors of a different proverb, cut them apart and then combined them into one. The Canadian poet Anne Carson wrote the text Hack Gloss in response to the “Hack Wit” drawings.