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5/11/2009

Roni Horn aka Roni Horn

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

“I want to make the meaning of a work people’s experience of it.” Roni Horn

NEW YORK, July 21, 2009 – Jointly organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and Tate Modern, Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, the most comprehensive overview of Roni Horn’s work to date, integrates three decades of the American artist’s sculpture, photography, installations, drawings, and books. Opening on November 6, 2009, the exhibition remains on view through January 24, 2010. Following the Whitney’s presentation, it travels to The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, where it will be seen from February 19 to June 13, 2010.

As De Salvo, Foster, and Godfrey write in their introduction to the exhibition catalogue, “One of the most compelling reasons to look back now at Horn’s work is to see how she has consistently addressed ideas about subjectivity and multiplicity while giving profound attention to materials and creating works of great beauty. There is an unwavering intensity in Horn’s ability to reconcile materials with personal experience. In a time of isolation and fragmentation, Horn’s singular and unrelenting focus on an object or an image demands much from viewers, but her work equally offers ample rewards to those willing to take the time to become a part of it.”

For more than thirty years, Horn has been developing work of concentrated visual power and intellectual rigor, often exploring issues of gender, identity, androgyny, and the complex relationship between object and subject. Because the artist chooses not to privilege any one medium, Horn’s art defies easy categorization. Materials – often used with remarkable virtuosity and sensitivity – take on metaphorical qualities and relate key themes with great visual power. Horn’s interest in doubling and identity, for example, is central to understanding her approach to the genres of portraiture and landscape. Image-specific photographic portraits and ethereally beautiful abstract cast glass sculpture relay aspects of both. Similarly, Horn’s intricately cut and pigmented drawings suggest something of the elemental nature of the earth that relates in turn to how the landscape of Iceland, where Horn has traveled and made work since 1975, has informed her practice.

Iceland has been a place of continual inspiration to the artist. Since 1990 Horn has produced an extraordinary series of books titled To Place with photographs of lava, geysers, glacial rivers, and hot pools, which will be presented. As Horn is quoted in the catalogue, “As a mass produced, portable object...the book goes out into the world, ultimately locating itself into the world where it is most desired.” Horn’s interest in writing and language is also reflected in her sculptures in which lines from Emily Dickinson’s writings are structurally embedded into aluminum rods. These machined, minimal pieces relate back in turn to sculptural installations like Things that Happen Again, for Two Rooms, which similarly uses an industrial process as a way to objectify language and give the viewer room for interpretation. Horn’s work has an undeniable material presence, a seductive, sensual beauty. Her means may seem simple, but her basic concerns with the nature of representation and the role played by the mind and subjectivity are deeply philosophical.

Major photographic works illustrate the various ways in which Horn has explored the genre of portraiture. This is Me, This is You (1999-2000) encompasses two separated panels of forty-eight paired photographs of Horn’s young niece as she plays with different identities and grows into adulthood. Cabinet Of (2001) comprises thirty-six photographs of a clown making expressions. In these works, the identity of the sitter is never fixed by the camera. You are the Weather (1994- 95) is an installation of one hundred close-up photographs of a woman immersed in Iceland's hot pools in changing climatic conditions, her features responding to the weather.

A large range of Horn's drawings are included in the exhibition, from her 1982 series Bluff Life to more recent works made from cutting and reconfiguring lines of pure pigment on expansive surfaces. Approaching them, their initial appearance shifts as one begins to look at the details of Horn’s cuts and pencil marks. Writing about the exhibition in its earlier, critically acclaimed incarnation at Tate Modern, Rachel Campbell-Johnston noted in the (London) Times: “Horn’s work moves (rather than develops) in a way that we can never quite predict. She never allows us to feel too familiar or certain of our assumptions...To walk through this show is to walk into a world of constant reflections...Horn’s art is to show you something that you cannot see.” And in The Guardian, Adrian Searle wrote, “The complications multiply; the paradox is how simple Horn’s art at first appears...For all the airiness and feeling of space, the show still gives us Horn’s breadth and range.”

Throughout the exhibition’s installation at the Whitney, the integration and cross relationships among the mediums in which the artist works will be fluid and the presentation on two floors will explore structurally the crucial concept of doubling in Horn’s work. The accompanying publication was conceived collaboratively by the artist, the publisher Steidl, and the organizing museums. The book is a two-volume hybrid: part catalogue and part index. The catalogue includes an introduction by curators Donna De Salvo, Carter E. Foster, and Mark Godfrey, and an essay by Briony Fer. In the Subject Index, a second volume that is in the form of a glossary, the entries are devoted to important ideas in Horn’s practice (such as double, Iceland, Emily Dickinson) or relate to individual works. Many of the entries include Horn’s own writings, published here for the first time. Other contributors include a number of prominent artists, critics, curators, and cultural figures, including Matthew Barney, Hélène Cixous, Tacita Dean, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Douglas Gordon, Collier Schorr, Nancy Spector, Ann Temkin, and Neville Wakefield, as well as the show’s three curators.

About the Artists
Roni Horn was born in New York in 1955, and lives and works in New York and Reykjavik. She received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale University. Horn’s work has been exhibited widely in major museums and galleries throughout the US and Europe. A retrospective was presented at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1999. Her work has been shown at the Whitney in Landscape (2005), as well as in the 1991 and 2004 Biennials and in the 2000 exhibition Roni Horn: Still Water (The River Thames, For Example). Horn has received the CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts, several NEA fellowships, and a Guggenheim fellowship. She has had one-person exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Dia Center for the Arts, New York, among others. Group exhibitions include Documenta (1992) and the Venice Biennale (1997), among many others.

Major support for this exhibition is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Generous support is provided by the Lannan Foundation, The James R. Hedges, IV Family Foundation, Donald R. Mullen, Jr., The Glenstone Foundation, and the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Additional support is provided by Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Gund, Jennifer and David Stockman, Nina and Michael Zilkha, The Fifth Floor Foundation and Elizabeth A. Sackler – JCF, Museum Educational Trust.

Image: Roni Horn, You are the Weather (detail), 1994-1995. Thirty-six gelatin silver prints and sixty-four chromogenic prints 10 x 8 in. each. © Roni Horn

Opening on November 6, 2009

The Whitney Museum
945 Madison Avenue, New York City
Museum hours: Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m
Friday from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m., closed Monday and Tuesday
Admission is $15 for adults; Members, children (ages 11 and under), and New York City public high school students free.
Senior citizens (62 and over) and students with valid ID: $10.
There is a $6 admission fee for a pass to the Kaufman Astoria Studios Film & Video Gallery only. Admission is pay-what-you-wish on Fridays, 6-9 pm.

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