Roni Horn
4 APRIL – 12 JULY 2024
New York, Wooster Street
On 4 April, Hauser & Wirth will open an exhibition of new works by Roni Horn at the gallery’s Wooster Street location in New York City. Renowned for a practice that combines conceptual rigor with an exquisite visual sensuality, Horn will present her latest series of works on paper and never before exhibited cast-glass sculptures. Highlighting her enduring exploration of identity, meaning and perception, these works continue to reveal Horn’s deeply conscientious engagement in humanity’s relationship to the natural world.
Drawing has been integral to Horn’s oeuvre for nearly 40 years. Describing it as her ‘primary activity,’ she expands the language of mark-making by constructing, deconstructing and then reconstructing images and texts. A meditation on meaning, Horn’s unique process of taking things apart and putting them back together anew tests the limits of draftsmanship by exploring its sculptural potential. For her latest series, titled ‘Slarips’ (the word ‘spirals’ written in reverse), Horn began by making watercolor spirals in an array of hues. She then cut up the painted images and collaged them together into new tessellated compositions. Each is titled with a deliberate misspelling of the word ‘spirals,’ signaling a profound departure from the work’s original source material.
The artist began making cast-glass sculptures in the mid-1990s, pouring colored molten glass into molds that would then gradually anneal over the course of several months. Horn spent years developing a specific technical process that furnishes her finished works with a nearly alchemical quality: they appear simultaneously fluid and solid. Visually ambiguous, their opaque, roughly textured sides bear impressions of the molds in which they were cast, while their glossy, fire-polished tops recall the crystal-clear surface of an undisturbed pool of water. Water, often considered a universal symbol for change, is a constant theme for Horn, once stating she is ‘…fascinated by this idea of water as a form of perpetual relation, not so much a substance but a thing whose identity was based on its relation to other things…. Rather than an object, water becomes a metaphor for consciousness—of time, of physicality, of the human condition.’
Roni Horn International Exhibitions
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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.
Current Exhibitions
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