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2/2/2005

Jenny Holzer

Spruth Magers Lee, London

Sprüth Magers Lee is proud to present new work by American artist Jenny Holzer.

With poems by Henri Cole

Over the past thirty years, Holzer has punctuated the art world with an exploration of text that seeks to highlight and challenge language's many forms of presentation, interpretation and perceived authority. Holzer's numerous installations, in both traditional exhibition contexts and within public spaces demonstrate the range of her chosen mediums. The artist's deft execution of such manoeuvres allows her to continually locate her audience within the changing interior of the texts.

Holzer began her career in the mid Seventies at a time when the proliferation of the mass media consumed and prescribed our interactions with the visual world. Holzer transformed the uses of the ubiquitous printed and projected word to explore the human realm of emotion. Working with the new electronic media made available by technological advance, Holzer played with the notion of the memorial and its position within a culture of transience.

From the prominent and celebrated one liners of the Truisms in the late seventies to the skin writing of Lustmord in the early nineties and more recently the Xenon projections, Holzer has sought to deconstruct language and its use as a weapon of direction and mediation. Within Holzer's works, the artists own voice is lost within a crowd of viewpoints, adopting no absolute or definitive stance. Texts often appear as statements or detached recollections of events resulting in a fractured narrative that encompasses both sides of a fictitious exchange. Holzer's lexicon of moral triggers and consistent use of first person narrative prompts the viewer to continually seek their own location within the work.

Holzer's reduction of human experience to language at its most impersonal and mechanical form constructs a space where the viewer implicitly completes the work. In the new works Looming and Rib Cage (2004), exhibited here within the gallery, Holzer has used exclusively the words of one narrator. The text that scrolls across the LED screens is the poetry of Henri Cole, American poet and friend of Holzer. The artist's physically arresting presentation of the text powerfully embodies Cole's stylistically contradictory and tender words. In Looming, eight LED panels are mounted above each other in decreasing sizes and as the words move past the viewer a brilliant pink light spills out on to surrounding gallery. In the work Rib Cage, Cole's narrative poem 'Beach Walk' (2004), scrolls across a curved wall of LED panels, the bright white text to front of the curve, encase a strong glow of red diodes to the back.

This visually stunning installation dominates every aspect of Sprüth Magers Lee's gallery space and provides a rare opportunity to be in such close proximity to the compelling physicality of Holzer's work.

Spruth Magers Lee
12 Berkeley Street London W1J 8DT
Open: Mon-Fri 10-6 - Sat 11-4

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