ART CITIES:N.York-Roni Horn

Using drawing, photography, installation, sculpture and literature, Roni Horn’s work consistently questions and generates uncertainty to thwart closure in her work, engaging with many different concerns and materials. Important across her oeuvre is her longstanding interest to the protean nature of identity, meaning, and perception, as well as the notion of doubling; issues which continue to propel Horn’s practice.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Hauser & Wirth Gallery Archive

Roni Horn has spent the past four decades questioning accepted notions of identity and meaning, thwarting closure and opening up new possibilities of perception through her expansive body of work across mediums. Roni Horn’s exhibition “Recent Work” presents the artist’s latest achievements in the realm of drawing, a medium she has described as “A kind of breathing activity on a daily level”. Drawing has been a defining element of Horn’s artistic practice since the 1980s. With this exhibition she debuts one of her most ambitious works on paper to date, the monumental installation of “LOG (March 22, 2019 – May 17, 2020)” (2019-20). Displayed as a series of over 400 individual sheets of paper, it contains a sequence of casual handwritten notes, observations, facts, quotes, original texts, news, collages, drawings, photographs, and lists created daily over the course of fourteen months. Horn would describe the events of weather, private life, and anything notable that came to mind or hand each day. One page is inscribed with quotations from Emily Dickinson and Mae West, while another features a pasted in photographic self-portrait of the artist above handwritten idioms such as ‘I could cry my eyes out’ and ‘laugh my head off’. In the artist’s “Wits’ End Mash” series, Horn’s use of image and language as subject matter acquires new potency. For these large-scale drawings, Horn has individually silkscreened approximately 300 handwritten sayings to overlap en masse on single sheets. Arcane phrases and common aphorisms – ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day,’ ‘happy as a clam,’ ‘Elvis has left the building’ – collide in up to 50 colors, their legibility obfuscated in ways that reveal the mutability of their meanings. To source these phrases, Horn surveyed acquaintances and strangers to assemble a catalogue of clichés and idioms. “Recent Work” also spotlight’s Horn’s “Yet” series, in which drawings composed with graphite and powdered pigment become ‘plates’ that the artist dissects, splices, and reassembles into final compositions. In such works as “Yet 10” (2017/2020), this process is visible in the way pencil marks, numbers, and words are interspersed between shards of color blocks and Horn’s annotations in the joining of plates within each drawing. Having first undertaken this unique pigment process in the early 1980s, Horn continually redefines the ways in which it can be used to lend physicality and depth to the practice of drawing.

Photo: Roni Horn, Wits’ End Mash (get under my skin), 2019, Individually silkscreened idioms. Original texts handwritten, authored by app. 300 people, silkscreen on paper, Up to 50 colors, 132/1 x 162.6 cm / 52 x 64 in, Photo: Ron Amstutz, © Roni Horn, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Gallery

Info: Hauser & Wirth Gallery, 542 West 22nd Street, New York, Duration: 23/2-10/4/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00 by booked appointment only, www.hauserwirth.com