Louise Bourgeois,
Roni Horn

3 June - 22 July 2006

Zürich

Roni Horn. Portrait of an Image. American artist Roni Horn (born 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.

Roni Horn’s latest publication “Rings of Lispector (Agua Viva)” will be available in good time for the exhibition in Zurich together with an essay by Hélène Cixous. 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

Roni Horn and Louise Bourgeois Drawings – curated by Jerry Gorovoy

In a joint exhibition, Louise Bourgeois and Roni Horn present a selection of their fabric and pigment drawings. Jerry Gorovoy, a long-time assistant to Louise Bourgeois, is curator of the exhibition that has been designed specifically for Hauser & Wirth.

The drawings of both artists essentially represent original creations while on the other hand constituting a parallel investigation to their sculptural work. The twenty or so works displayed show that Bourgeois and Horn are concerned with examining the relationship of the doubling of form, the paired form and the spiral form. Also apparent is their related sense of structure, order and chaos; the cutting and pasting in Roni Horn’s drawings give them a corporeality similar that produced by the cutting and sewing of Louise Bourgeois’ works.

Louise Bourgeois' body of drawings, created over the last 60 years, exhibits an immense diversity of techniques, forms and motifs. The exhibition focuses on the fabric drawings composed between 2003 and 2006. Some of these works are being shown publicly for the first time, others could recently be seen in a comprehensive exhibition of her works in Vienna’s Kunsthalle. For the fabric drawings, Bourgeois uses her clothes, tablecloths and bed linen. She sews these fabrics, usually striped, in concentric circles and spirals together to form spider-like or kaleidoscope-like patterns to produce an “esthetic tissue of linearities” so that the two-dimensional surfaces acquire a sculptural character through the fabric and the seams. The material used, the act of sewing and darning, as well as the recurrent motif of the spider’s web are closely linked to her memories of her mother, who died at an early age and ran a workshop for restoring tapestries together with her husband. “I have always had the fear of being separated and abandoned. The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole.”

Roni Horn works mainly with sculpture, drawing and photography, without favoring any of these media. Important individual exhibitions have been frequently dedicated to her body of drawings, such as in the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2003-04), in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Basel (1995) and in the Kunstmuseum Winterthur (1993). This exhibition displays a group of her pigment drawings produced since 1985. In looking at these abstract and extremely sublime drawings and contrasting them with the work of Bourgeois, the observer is struck by their formal similarities. Specks of red, green and blue pigment cohere in a fragmentary manner to form concentric circles and shape-pairs. These large-format drawings with words and fragments written in pencil result from the direct application of pigments onto paper followed by a process of scrupulously careful cutting into pieces and reconstituting them again. The pigment powder is applied to the paper with a little turpentine and then fixed by applying lacquer with a brush. The paper is finally cut up into strips and various geometrical shapes to be subsequently reconstituted again on a large sheet of paper that acts as a substrate, so that seams are produced just like in the fabric drawings of Louise Bourgeois. The composition created by cutting, pasting and recombining single fragments, like an assemblage, reveals the aims of a sculptress who engages with the nature of space and the relationship between individual elements.

Louise Bourgeois (born 1911 Paris) has lived and worked in New York since 1938. Next year, the Tate Modern in London will devote a comprehensive retrospective to the artist to coincide with her 95th birthday (planned stations: Centre Pompidou Paris, Guggenheim New York and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art).

Selected images

Louise Bourgeois

Untitled

2002

Louise Bourgeois

Untitled

1991

Louise Bourgeois

Untitled

Louise Bourgeois

Untitled

2003

Louise Bourgeois

Untitled

2005

Louise Bourgeois

Untitled

2005

Louise Bourgeois

Untitled

2005

Installation views

About the Artists

Louise Bourgeois

Born in France in 1911, and working in America from 1938 until her death in 2010, Louise Bourgeois is recognized as one of the most important and influential artists of the 20th Century. For over seven decades, Bourgeois’s creative process was fueled by an introspective reality, often rooted in cathartic re-visitations of early childhood trauma and frank examinations of female sexuality. Articulated by recurrent motifs (including body parts, houses and spiders), personal symbolism and psychological release, the conceptual and stylistic complexity of Bourgeois’s oeuvre—employing a variety of genres, media and materials—plays upon the powers of association, memory, fantasy, and fear.

Bourgeois’s work is inextricably entwined with her life and experiences: fathoming the depths of emotion and psychology across two- and three-dimensional planes of expression. ‘Art,’ as she once remarked in an interview, ‘is the experience, the re-experience of a trauma.’ Arising from distinct and highly individualized processes of conceptualization, Bourgeois's multiplicity of forms and materials enact a perpetual play: at once embedding and conjuring emotions, only to dispel and disperse their psychological grasp. Employing motifs, dramatic colors, dense skeins of thread, and vast variety of media, Bourgeois's distinctive symbolic code enmeshes the complexities of the human experience and individual introspection.

Rather than pursuing formalist concerns for their own sake, Bourgeois endeavored to find the most appropriate means of expressing her ideas and emotions, combining a wide range of materials—variously, fabric, plaster, latex, marble and bronze—with an endless repertoire of found objects. Although her oeuvre traverses the realms of painting, drawing, printmaking, and performance, Bourgeois remains best known for her work in sculpture.

Bourgeois’s early works include her distinct 'Personages' from the late 1940s and early 1950s; a series of free-standing sculptures which reference the human figure and various urban structures, including skyscrapers. The ‘Personages’ served as physical surrogates for the friends and family Bourgeois had left behind in France, while also highlighting an interest in architecture dating back to her childhood. Her installation of these sculptures as clustered ‘environments’ in 1949 and 1950 foreshadowed the immersive encounters of installation art twenty years before the genre’s rise to prominence.

Bourgeois’s work was included in the seminal exhibition ‘Eccentric Abstraction,’ curated by Lucy Lippard for New York's Fischbach Gallery in 1966. Major breakthroughs on the international scene followed with The Museum of Modern Art in New York's 1982 retrospective of her work; Bourgeois's participation in Documenta IX in 1992; and her representation of the United States at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993.

In 2001, Bourgeois was the first artist commissioned to fill the Tate Modern’s cavernous Turbine Hall. The Tate Modern’s 2007 retrospective of her works, which subsequently traveled to the Centre Pompidou in Paris; The Guggenheim Museum in New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; and The Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., cemented her legacy as a foremost grande dame of late Modernism.

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.