RONI HORN
Hauser & Wirth presents an exhibition by Roni Horn. 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.
April 4 – June 28, 2024
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.
Horn is an avid reader, and as much a writer as she is a visual artist. Words naturally permeate her practice. In this exhibition, her use of language pertains to the works’ titles, which act as entrance rather than explanation. Horn’s wordplay also figures in the sculptures on view: the titles of the six luminous cast-glass forms feature quotes from novels, films and radio broadcasts.
As daylight pours in from the skylights, moving across the gallery and changing temperature over the course of the day, the saturation and transparency of the colors likewise shift. The subtle effects of varying light, combined with viewers’ movements in the room, activate these works, which defy any fixed reading.
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.
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.’
This spring, Horn’s work will be presented in the following solo exhibitions: ‘Roni Horn. Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death,’ at Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany (23 March – 11 August); ‘Roni Horn. The Detour of Identity,’ at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark (2 May – 1 September); and at Hauser & Wirth Menorca (11 May – 27 October).