RONI HORN
White Dickinson (THE MOST TANGIBLE THING IS THE MOST ADHESIVE), 2006
Aluminum and solid cast white plastic
2 x 2 x 90-1/4 inches (5.1 x 5.1 x 229.2 cm)
Roni Horn at the Gagosian Gallery
Beverly Hills, July 24 – August 29, 2008
“The conceptual origins of one work often bleed over into another form. That’s why I’ve never restricted myself to any single idiom… Each form, to me, comments on and enriches the experience of the other.”
— Roni Horn
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Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by Roni Horn. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in almost ten years, and her first with the gallery.
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 . Last year, her sustained dialogue with Iceland found a permanent place in Vatnasafn/Library of Water , a project with Artangel Trust that is at once a building, a sculpture, and an ecological and literary resource for the community.
“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.
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