Roni Horn

Selected Drawings 1984 – 2012

11 June - 14 July 2012

Zürich

'If you were to ask me what I do, I would say I draw – this is the primary activity and that all my work has this in common regardless of idiom or material' – Roni Horn in a letter to Paulo Herkenhoff, 2003

Hauser & Wirth is proud to announce the first survey exhibition dedicated solely to the pigment drawings of New York-based artist Roni Horn. Ranging from early pieces which showcase Horn's initial experimentations with pure pigment and varnish to new and intricate, large-scale drawings, these works move beyond the limitations of their medium and instead explore the materiality of colour and the sculptural potential of drawing.

In the mid-1980s, Horn made her first drawings using pure pigment and featuring groupings of un-even shapes. Whether semi-conical, semi-pyramidal, or semi-rectangular, the objects waver between easily identifiable geometric forms and abstract volumes. Each is densely filled with powdered pigment in gemlike shades of deep red, bright yellow and brilliant green. The pigment is not painted within the outlines of the shape; instead it is layered thickly on to the paper, mixing in small amounts of turpentine, and then adding varnish little by little in a laborious process which lends physicality and depth to the two-dimensional works.

An important feature of Horn's work is her sculptural and photographic explorations into the implications of repetition and doubling. Early drawings such as 'Must 21' (1985) also represent a two-dimensional investigation into multiplicity, perception and memory. 'Must 21' depicts a group of dark grey, tapered cylindrical shapes flecked with green, red and white pigments. Although similar at first glance and placed side-by-side, the shapes are not presented in a progressive or logical sequence. Instead, they have a built-in repetition with minor variations, such as the multicoloured traces of pigment, that require the viewer to commit their time and attention to teasing out the subtle differences.

Horn's more recent drawings display a significant increase in scale and complexity. Each work is composed of separate drawings, or 'plates'. Horn first cuts these plates then stitches elements from them together, creating entirely new forms through continuous cutting and pasting. Light pencil marks are dispersed throughout the drawings, indicating the joins of different plates and recording names or random pairings of words. These annotations marked time like a metronome as Horn carried out her exploration of the drawing's expansive surface. In her essay in 'Roni Horn aka Roni Horn', Briony Fer described Horn’s work as 'complete with missing parts', capturing 'the sense of a total object that is all absorbing yet at the same time intractable in some way and, therefore, always incomplete. This refusal to deliver everything easily or quickly forces us to slow down and reflect: to hold on to that tenuous hold'.

Installation views

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.