Roni Horn

Portrait of an Image

3 June - 22 July 2006

Zürich

American artist Roni Horn (*1955) lives and works in New York and Reykjavik. She is among the most important representatives of contemporary art. Since the early 1980s her works have been displayed in numerous solo and group exhibitions at leading art institutions worldwide. These include Inverleith House in Edinburgh (2006), Fotomuseum Winterthur (2003), Art Institute of Chicago (2004), Folkwang Museum Essen (2004), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2003), Dia Center for the Arts New York (2001-02), Museo Serralves, Porto (2001) and the Basel Kunsthalle (1995).

The artistic work of Roni Horn is expressed through the use of numerous media. In addition to her photographic work she focuses on spatial installations, works on paper and sculptures made from glass or metal. She also works intensively with words and language, using her own texts and those from other sources. She regularly publishes books that offer an intimate, sensuous access to her artistic work.

Her current exhibition Roni Horn, Portrait of an Image is the first major solo exhibition of her work in the Zurich gallery. At the centre is one of her most recent works - Portrait of an Image (with Isabelle Huppert) – a series of a hundred photographic portraits of French actress Isabelle Huppert, whose face reflects a wide variety of emotions. Horn photographed the actress in twenty sequences of five photos each. In each sequence, Huppert briefly slips into one of her film characters so that her face expresses personalities that do not exist in reality but only in the film. Roni Horn’s photographs show studies of physiognomy in the finest variations in which the individual is always a plurality.

The basic attitude that permits access to Roni Horn’s work is her idea of an encyclopedia of identity. Central to her series and pairs are the notions of diversity as the basis of identity, the capability of transformation and the impossibility of a permanently defined identity.

In addition to the photo series Portrait of an Image, Roni Horn shows one of her glass sculptures. Doubt Block is a rectangular amber-colored glass block (129 x106 x 55 cm) and weighs 1’840 kg. The sculpture is solid, highly polished, dense and indestructible. Its interior can be intuited, but is not accessible.

Further works in the exhibition – White Dickinson – are long square aluminum sculptures with words in white plastic cast within – texts include MY FLOWERS ARE NEAR AND FOREIGN, TO SHUT OUR EYES IS TRAVEL, or I THINK OF YOUR FOREST AND SEA AS A FAR OFF SHERBET. These sentences are from the published letters of Emily Dickinson and shows Roni Horn’s admiration for the writings of the poet.

In a joint exhibition with Louise Bourgeois on the upper floor, Roni Horn presents a selection of large-format pigment drawings that she has produced since 1985. Jerry Gorovoy, a long-time assistant to Louise Bourgeois, is curator of the exhibition that has been designed specifically for Hauser & Wirth.

Roni Horn’s latest publication “Rings of Lispector (Agua Viva)” with an essay by Hélène Cixous will be launched at the opening in Zurich. Book 1: 120 pages with 29 color plates Book 2 (Agua Viva: Seventeen Paradoxes): 24 pages with 17 color plates Steidl Verlag Göttingen and Hauser & Wirth Zurich London

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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