Roni Horn, You are the Weather, 1994-95 (detail), gelatin-silver printm 64 C-prints and 36 gelatin-silver prints, 21.4 x 26.5 cm each, 100 units, The artist and Hauser & Wirth Zürich London, © Roni Horn.

Roni Horn, Gold Mats, Paired (For Ross and Felix), 1995, Pure gold (99.99 percent), two parts: 49 x 60 x .008" each, The Art Institute of Chicago, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.

Roni Horn, Untitled (Aretha), 2002-04, Solid cast glass, 38.1 x 76.2 x 76.2 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York; fractional and promised gift of Kathy and Richard S. Fuld Jr. © Roni Horn.

Roni Horn, Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) –Image C, 1999, Offset lithograph (photograph and text combined) on uncoated paper, 30-1/2 x 41-1/2", Edition of 7, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.

Roni Horn, Asphere, 1986-1993, Solid copper, 12 inches x variable diameter, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.

Roni Horn, Gurgles, Sucks, Echoes, 1992, Gouache, watercolor and gum arabic on paper, 10 x 8", Private Collection, Zurich, Photo by Bill Jacobson, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.

Tate Modern
Bankside
+44 20 7887 8888
London
Level 4 West
Roni Horn aka Roni Horn
25 February-25 May 2009

For more than 30 years, Roni Horn (b. 1955) has been developing work of concentrated visual power and intellectual rigor, 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 — 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 portraiture and landscape. Image-specific photographic portraits and ethereally beautiful abstract cast glass sculpture speak to both as Horn’s intricately cut and pigmented drawings suggest something elemental 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.

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. Included in the exhibition are approximately seventy works, varying in scale from small drawings to room-sized photographic installations to sculptures weighing several tons. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated two-volume publication: a catalogue with an introduction by the three curators, and an essay by Briony Fer, and a subject index, a second volume in the form of a glossary that is devoted to important ideas in Horn’s practice or that relate to individual works.

This exhibition, the most significant overview of American artist Roni Horn's practice to date, will show her earliest works from the mid-1970s alongside pieces from the intervening years and new sculptures. For Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, all the windows in Tate Modern’s west galleries will be uncovered so that Horn’s sculptures can be seen in shifting natural light

Horn has always defined the meaning of her work as the experience that the viewer has with it. In the 1980s she made pairs of copper objects and showed them in different relationships, for instance in two separate rooms. Unable to see both objects simultaneously, the viewer remembers one when encountering the next. Many of Horn's works feature paired elements which might be similar or identical although the viewer's experience of each is unique. The exhibition will include the diptych Dead Owl,1997 and the sculpture Paired Gold Mats – For Ross and Felix, 1994. Pairing carries a different nuance with the latter, as it can be seen as a tribute to two lovers.

Many of Horn’s works are connected to her ideas about identity. Critical of fixed categories, she explores ideas around mutability and androgyny. Horn has written that "Androgyny is the possibility of a thing containing multiple identities." Her work as a whole is formally and materially diverse, while individual works also explore change. Still Water (The River Thames, for Example), 1999 is an installation of photographs of the river's surface with footnotes written by Horn about its history and our relationship with water. Her solid glass sculptures do not have fixed identities, their appearance altering with reflected light.

Three major photographic works show 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 48 paired photographs of Horn’s young niece as she plays with different identities and grows into adulthood. Cabinet Of 2001 comprises 36 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 100 close-up photographs of a woman immersed in Iceland's hot pools in changing climatic conditions, her features responding to the weather. The 'You' in Horn's title addresses the viewer who might sense that they are causing the shifts in the woman's expressions. 

The exhibition will also look at Horn's engagement with Iceland, a place in which geological identity is continually in flux. Since 1990 she has produced an extraordinary series of books titled To Place with photographs of lava, geysers, glacial rivers, and hot pools which will be presented within a room of cabinets. Adjacent to this display there will be the related photographic installation Pi, 1998 which explores geological, animal, and human cycles of life around the Arctic Circle.

A large range of Horn's drawings are included in the exhibition, from her 1982 series Bluff Life to recent works made by cutting together similar drawings and reconfiguring them on expansive surfaces with pencil annotations. Approaching them, their initial appearance fragments when one begins to look at the details of these cuts and pencil marks. Rarely shown in the UK, these drawings will be placed throughout the exhibition.

Roni Horn was born in New York in 1955, and lives and works in New York. She received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale University. Horn explores the mutable nature of art through sculptures, works on paper, photography, and books. She describes drawing as the key activity in all her work because drawing is about composing relationships. Horn’s drawings concentrate on the materiality of the objects depicted. She also uses words as the basis for drawings and other works. Horn crafts complex relationships between the viewer and her work by installing a single piece on opposing walls, in adjoining rooms, or throughout a series of buildings. She subverts the notion of "identical experience," insisting that one’s sense of self is marked by a place in the here-and-there, and by time in the now-and-then. She describes her artworks as site-dependent, expanding upon the idea of site-specificity associated with Minimalism. Horn’s work also embodies the cyclical relationship between humankind and nature — a mirror-like relationship in which we attempt to remake nature in our own image. Since 1975 Horn has traveled often to Iceland, whose landscape and isolation have strongly influenced her practice. Some Thames (2000), a permanent installation at the University of Akureyri in Iceland, consists of 80 photographs of water dispersed throughout the university’s public spaces, echoing the ebb and flow of students and learning over time at the university. Roni Horn 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; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial (1991, 2004); Documenta (1992); and Venice Biennale (1997), among others.

Roni Horn aka Roni Horn is organised by Tate Modern and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The exhibition is curated by Mark Godfrey at Tate Modern and Donna de Salvo and Carter Foster at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It will travel to Collection Lambert in Avignon, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the ICA Boston. It will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated publication in two volumes: a show-specific catalogue with a lead essay by Briony Fer and an artist’s book with Horn’s own writing and texts by 30 other artists, curators and writers.

Roni Horn, Opposite of White, v. 1, 2006, Solid cast glass, height 38.1 cm, diameter 101.6 cm, The artist and Hauser & Wirth Zürich London © Roni Horn.

Roni Horn, Opposite of White, v. 1 (Large) (B), 2006, Solid cast Colorless glass (N-BK7), with as-cast surfaces on all sides (Fire-polished top), 20 x 56 x 56".

Gagosian Gallery
456 North Camden Drive
Beverly Hills
310-271-9400
Roni Horn
July 24-August 29, 2008

Horn's oeuvre, which spans almost four decades, encompasses sculpture, drawing, photography, language, and site-specific installation. Compelled by the elusive nature of identity, she concentrates on the phenomenological problems of material, form, time, presence, and place in nuanced installations and exemplary books that brim with subtle energy and quiet intensity. The qualities of Iceland's unique environment have inspired many of her most acclaimed works, including the ongoing series of volumes To Place (1990-) and the photographic cycles You Are the Weather and Pi.

"Pairing," or the use of doubling, is a pervasive strategy in Horn's graphic, photographic and sculptural work, designed to invoke the viewer's experience of engaged memory. In this exhibition, a pair of large cast-glass sculptures, Opposite of White, v.2 (large) and Opposite of White, v.1 (large), are set apart spatially to be united by the process of viewing. Continuing the intensely processual portraiture that she began with You Are the Weather (1994), five sequences of ten photographs, Untitled (Isabelle Huppert) 2005, capture the iconic actress in many different moods and characters, a sustained paradox of fleeting expressions. The active relationship between perceiving and remembering is further mined in an ongoing series of inlaid aluminum rod sculptures begun in the early nineties. These lean on one end against the wall, bearing snatches of verse by two favored referents, Flannery O'Connor and Emily Dickinson. Though the three genres of work may not appear to bear any obvious relation to one another, within the time and experience of the exhibition their relational significance finds full value.

Roni Horn was born in New York in 1955. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University. She has received many awards including three NEA Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1990. and the Alpert Award in 1998. Her work has been shown in and collected by major museums throughout the world, including the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1999); Dia Center for the Arts (2001); Art Institute of Chicago and Centre Georges Pompidou (2004); Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX. A retrospective of her work will open at the Tate Modern in 2009 and travel to the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Roni Horn, White Dickinson (The Stars Are Not Hereditary), 2007, Aluminum and solid cast white plastic, 56-1/8 x 2 x 2", Ed. of 3, Photo by Beatriz Palacios.

Roni Horn, Untitled (Isabelle Huppert), 2004, Standard Chromogenic print on Fuji Crystal Archive mounted on 1/8" sintra, 5 images: 13-1/2 x 11", each, Mounted: each 38.1 x 31.8 cm, Ed. of 4.