Roni Horn

Rings of Lispector (Agua Viva)

17 November - 23 December 2004

London

Hauser & Wirth London are delighted to present Roni Horn’s first major solo exhibition in the UK. Horn’s remarkable body of work continues to communicate how she imaginatively inhabits the world and combines a careful study of the role of language in perception. Horn’s unique ability to engage the viewer with a vivid sense of time and place in her range of sculptures, books, drawings and photographic installations, provide an active pursuit of self-revelation and the transience of form.

For this exhibition, the entire floorplan of the main gallery is given over to a single work Agua Viva (2004). Consisting of interconnecting rubber tiles, the work is inlaid with select passages from Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s book “Agua Viva” (Stream of Life). Translated by Hélène Cixous, phrases appear on the floor in circular arrangements, echoing the movement of raindrops on the surface of water. The work embodies a sense of the dialectic between architectural space and poetic force, encouraging one to experience the rubber physically underfoot and to view the words from above. This act of location addresses inner emotions with the idea of landscape.

Upstairs, Rings of Lispector (Agua Viva) (2004) comprises individual silkscreen prints that complement the installation Agua Viva. In the basement Vault Room, Cabinet of (2001) features 36 portraits of a clown; an ephemeral and shifting personality whose facial expressions appear blurred and multiple, causing the viewer to question motifs of identity and replication. Positioned throughout the exhibition space, Doubt By Water (2004) is a series of double-sided photographs on aluminium stands. First exhibited at the 2004 Whitney Biennial, each stand operates like signage requiring the viewer to move from one element to the next, creating a dialogue between one’s surroundings and identity.

Over the years, Horn has repeatedly visited Iceland, producing several works that apply her vocabulary to its elemental vastness. In her encyclopaedic venture To Place (1990-), an ongoing series of self-published books, Horn traces a personal journey immersed in the Icelandic landscape. You Are The Weather (1994-1995), a photographic cycle featuring 100 shots of the same woman, deals with the enigma of identity captured through a series of facial expressions dictated by imperceptible weather changes.

An important factor in Horn’s conceptual and aesthetic sensibility is her exploration of the possibilities of language as a sculptural form. Inspired by literary sources, she combines linguistic construction with the dimensions of physical experience. Works such as How Dickinson Stayed Home (1992-93), Kafka’s Palindrome (1991-94) and Key and Cues (1994) use fragments of text transformed through Horn’s sculptural practice. In doing so, she plays with our ability to discern and register difference. Photographic works address notions of duality and ambiguity; the work charged with an almost subliminal reading of the difference between object, image and identity. This is evidenced in works such as Dead Owl (1997), where her ‘pairing’ of images expresses Horn’s desire to emphasise the space ‘in-between’: a recognition of uniqueness through an understanding of similarity.

Roni Horn has had major international solo and group exhibitions. Solo exhibitions include the Art Institute of Chicago (2004), Folkwang Museum, Essen (2004), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2003), Fotomuseum Winterthur (2003), the Dia Center for the Arts, New York (2001-02), Museo Serralves (2001), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2000-01), Castello di Rivoli, Torino (2000), Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1999), De Pont Foundation for Contemporary Art, Tilburg (1998), the Wexner Center for the Arts (1996), Ohio and Kunsthalle Basel (1995). Group shows include the 2004 Whitney Biennial, New York, the XLVII Venice Biennale (1997) and Documenta IX, Kassel (1992), . Born in 1955, the artist lives and works in New York and Rejkyavik.

About the Artist

Roni Horn

Roni Horn’s work consistently generates uncertainty to thwart closure in her work. Important across her oeuvre is her longstanding interest to the protean nature of identity, meaning, and perception, as well as the notion of doubling; issues which continue to propel Horn’s practice.

Since the mid-1990s, Horn has been producing cast-glass sculptures. For these works, colored molten glass assumes the shape and qualities of a mold as it gradually anneals over several months. The sides and bottom of the resulting sculpture are left with the rough translucent impression of the mold in which it was cast. By stark contrast, the top surface is fire-polished and slightly bows like liquid under tension. The seductively glossy surface invites the viewer to gaze into the optically pristine interior of the sculpture, as if looking down on a body of water through an aqueous oculus. Exposed to the reflections from the sun or to the shadows of an overcast day, Horn’s glass sculpture relies upon natural elements like the weather to manifest her binary experimentations in color, weight and lightness, solidity and fluidity. The endless subtle shifts in the work’s appearance place it in an eternal state of mutability, as it refuses a fixed visual identity. Begetting solidity and singularity, the changing appearance of her sculptures is where one discovers meaning and connects her work to the concept of identity.

For Horn, drawing is a primary activity that underpins her wider practice. Her intricate works on paper examine recurring themes of interpretation, mirroring and textual play, which coalesce to explore the materiality of color and the sculptural potential of drawing. Horn’s preoccupation with language also permeates these works; her scattered words read as a stream of consciousness spiralling across the paper. In her ‘Hack Wit’ series, Horn reconfigures idiomatic turns of phrase and proverbs to engender nonsensical, jumbled expressions. The themes of pairing and mirroring emerge as she intertwines not only the phrases themselves but also the paper they are inscribed on, so that her process reflects the content of the drawings. Words are her images and she paints them expressionistically, which—combined with her method—causes letters to appear indeterminate, as if they are being viewed underwater.

Notions of identity and mutability are also explored within Horn’s photography, which tends to consist of multiple pieces and installed as a surround which unfolds within the gallery space. Examples include her series ‘The Selected Gifts, (1974 - 2015),’ photographed with a deceptively affectless approach that belies sentimental value. Here, Horn’s collected treasures float against pristine white backdrops in the artist’s signature serial style, telling a story of the self as mediated through both objects and others—what the artist calls ‘a vicarious self-portrait.’ This series, alongside her other photographic projects, build upon her explorations into the effects of multiplicity on perception and memory, and the implications of repetition and doubling, which remain central to her work.

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