Wits’ End Sampler | Recent Drawings
10 June - 1 September 2018
Zürich
‘The drawings are something I’ve carried on over decades, and they form a kind of breathing activity on a daily level…When I looked up the word ‘draw’ in the dictionary, I found that there were twenty-two definitions, one of which was to delineate with lines. The other twenty-one definitions are all dialectic activities, to metamorphose, to translate, to take aim…That’s where I took off from with the idea of drawing…these lines for example, are not lines, they’re edges. In other words it’s material and it’s physical reality, they’re constructions of space with a reasonable analogy to architecture.’ – Roni Horn (From: ‘Art and Architecture’ (Chinati Symposium, Marfa TX, 1998))
Hauser & Wirth Zürich is pleased to present ‘Wits’ End Sampler | Recent Drawings’, an exhibition of large-scale drawings by acclaimed American artist Roni Horn and the unveiling of a new installation.
For Horn, drawing is a primary activity that has been a defining area of her artistic practice since 1980, and the pigment drawings explore recurrent themes of identity, interpretation and textual play. In drawings from the Yet series, Horn has worked powdered pigment, graphite and varnish into a few first phase drawings called ‘plates’, which are then cut apart. These pieces are then rearranged and assembled, and may undergo several more cycles of splicing and stitching together before taking their ultimate form. Pencil marks, numbers and words are interspersed between shards of colour as Horn annotates the joining of plates in each drawing.
‘Wits’ End Sampler’ is a new installation that will be shown for the first time in Zurich. Idioms and textual play have always been a significant part of Horn’s work. For this project, Horn invited strangers and associates to write out idioms and clichés of their choosing. This eventually accumulated into over 1000 individual phrases all handwritten by the many authors. Walls of the second floor gallery will be silk-screened with these idioms to create a constructed linguistic environment. ‘Wits’ End Sampler’ is a work where Horn acts as ‘a choreographer of words’, as Gary Indiana has called the artist.
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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Downtown Los Angeles
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