Roni Horn: The Detour of Identity @ Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek

Roni Horn: The Detour of Identity

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek

2 May – 1 September 2024

RONI HORN

The Detour of Identity, 1984–85

Gouache on paper/ board

© Roni Horn

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

RONI HORN

Untitled (Weather) 2010-2011

Detail

© Roni Horn

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. 

Photo: Alex Delfanne

RONI HORN

Untitled (Weather) 2010-2011

Detail

© Roni Horn

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. 

Photo: Alex Delfanne

With cinematic art as its prism, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art presents American artist RONI HORN (b. 1955). This exhibition introduces a new approach to photography, drawing and sculpture by one of the most distinctive voices of our time. Iconic scenes from some of cinema’s greatest films form part of the presentation of the artist’s work. In keeping with Roni Horn’s preoccupation with the changing weather – with light and movement – the extensive exhibition is being shown in daylight – natural light – in Louisiana’s South Wing.

“The inspiration Roni Horn takes from film, her fascination for film imagery and the narrative of images, is new ground on which to present her work. Louisiana’s guests will move through the South Wing, crosscutting between Horn’s works and sequences from film, which constitute an active and significant part of the material that has shaped the artist.”

– Poul Erik Tøjner, Louisiana’s Director.

Roni Horn often applies the language and effects of film in her practice, and, as in the world of film, she exploits the tension between the outer world, where the socially defined body predominates, and the inner world of conscious reality, where the body, with its urges and desires, resides. Throughout the exhibition these clips from some of history’s most famous film narratives form a parallel path to Roni Horn’s oeuvre.

There is something very powerful about the work of Roni Horn. Seemingly razor-sharp and cool, it juxtaposes humans and landscape, permanence and changeability, obscurity and transparency in a flow of light, water and weather. Horn tackles themes such as identity and sexuality. Who am I? What does my gender mean? What language do we have to express emotions? Are emotions private? What is the order of nature vis-à-vis humankind?

Her questions are philosophical and fundamental; her answers are tangible works of art. But the works never come across as answers – they are more like quasi facts that require interpretation. Horn does not beg for our attention in order to be permitted to reveal. We must ask ourselves what we are seeing; there is little use in asking Roni Horn because the artist cares little for the notion that we require information before encountering her art. Knowledge, she says, can act as an obstacle to experience.

Identity is the central and recurring theme in the exhibition’s selection of films and film clips – the quest for identity, loss of identity, mistaken or stolen identity, and so on. Each of the films has, on some level, been important to Roni Horn, and therefore each represents another identification, be it with the actions of the character or with the knowledge that organises the film’s narrative and imagery.

The exhibition is an imaginary journey through the artist’s imagery, expanding to include the sense of community that has emerged around many of these celebrated films. A few examples of the film clips in the exhibition are Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Vertigo, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, Claude Chabrol’s The Does and Carl Th. Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc.

RONI HORN

Dead Owl, 1997

Detail

© Roni Horn

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth 

Photo: Bill Jacobson

RONI HORN

Untitled ("My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. 

I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. 

I have often thought that with any luck at all 

I could have been born a werewolf, 

because the two middle fingers 

on both my hands are the same length, 

but I have had to be content with what I had. 

I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. 

I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, 

and Amanita phalloides, the deathcup mushroom. 

Everyone else in my family is dead.") 2012-2013

© Roni Horn

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Genevieve Hanson

Roni Horn has been represented in Louisiana’s collection for over twenty years. From some Thames (2000) was acquired for the collection in 2002. Later came the glass sculpture Untitled (“The sensation of longing for an eclipse of the moon.”) from 2013 and the major work a.k.a. (2008–2009), which deals with identity and consists of thirty photographs from Roni Horn’s life, all depictions of her taken by different people over time. The same person is at once both herself and 29 others. It is a beautifully lucid and entirely undogmatic demonstration of how difficult it can be to say exactly who and what someone is; and the fluidity, the things that cannot be captured or fixed – from the weather to the light to water to sexuality, to dreams, to, well, who you are – flows through Louisiana’s exhibition, even in the handsome sculptures of infinitely slowly setting tempered glass that let light play in colours of immense beauty.

RONI HORN - THE DETOUR OF IDENTITY

Published by Steidl / Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

472 pages, 539 images

Otabind softcover, 24.7 x 29.7 cm, English

ISBN 978-3-96999-378-1

The exhibition is accompanied by an international publication (in English) entitled The Detour of Identity. The publication, edited by Jerry Gorovoy, is published in collaboration with Louisiana Museum of Modern Art by the German publisher Steidl and  features texts by Briony Fer, Elisabeth Bronfen and Gary Indiana. Foreword by Poul Erik Tøjner and introduction by Jerry Gorovoy.

The exhibition has been curated by Roni Horn’s long-time friend Jerry Gorovoy, also known as the personal assistant to Louise Bourgeois for four decades, in collaboration with Louisiana’s Director Poul Erik Tøjner.

Louisiana Channel has produced the videos Roni Horn – Saying Water (2013) and Roni Horn – Interviewed by Dayanita Singh (2013). Both are available on Louisiana Channel: https://channel.louisiana.dk/

LOUISIANA MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Gl. Strandvej 13 - 3050 Humlebæk

louisiana.dk

Artist Roni Horn Exhibition @ Museum Ludwig, Cologne - "Roni Horn: Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death" + Catalogue

Roni Horn 

Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death

Museum Ludwig, Cologne 

March 23 – Au­gust 11, 2024

Museum Ludwig presents Roni Horn: Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death, a solo exhibition of works by influential American artist Roni Horn. The exhibition includes over 100 works, spanning from the beginning of the artist’s decades long career to present day.

Roni Horn's work spans from photography to drawing, artist books, sculpture, and installation. Behind this openness lies the artist's understanding that everything in the world is mutable and cannot be subjected to fixed attribution. The exhibition at the Museum Ludwig examines this idea through three recurring themes in Roni Horn's work: nature, identity, and language.

The title of the exhibition is derived from a quote by Patrick Henry, an advocate for American independence in the eighteenth century, who concluded a speech with the words, “Give me liberty or give me death!” Roni Horn is more interested in the visual power of the quote than its original context; in her adaptation of the structure of Henry’s famous exclamation, she substitutes the word "paradox" for "liberty", thus equating the meanings of both terms. For Roni Horn, paradoxes are a way to access ambiguity, a quality in which things may contain their opposites.

Upon entering the exhibition, viewers are greeted by This is Me, This is You (1997-2000), a photographic work installed on two opposing walls. Each wall contains 48 framed photographs of the artist’s niece, which were taken over a two-year period during her adolescence. Every photograph corresponds with one on the opposing wall, showing subtle changes between split seconds. As she explains in a 1989 interview, “The pair form, by virtue of the condition of being double, actively refuses the possibility of being experienced as a thing in itself.” Here, Horn not only employs doubles or pairs, but also speaks to identity’s constant flux.

Yilmaz Dziewior, curator of the exhibition, comments, “Roni Horn began exploring fluid representations of gender long before terms such as 'genderqueer' and 'nonbinary' entered public discourse. In her (self-)portraits, you see a person who fluctuates between genders without needing to find a specific term to describe this mode of being. She shows humans as organisms constantly manifesting themselves in a state of perpetual transformation. While extremely precise and highly aesthetic, her objects, photographs, and drawings have a liberating and emancipatory potential because they are often intangible and indefinable.”

Moving through the exhibition, viewers encounter never before exhibited drawings from the late 1970s, in addition to a selection of pigment drawings produced between 1983 and 2018. 

Photographic works on view include the seminal work Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) (1999), comprised of 15 photographs which act as a portrait of the River Thames in Southern England; a.k.a. (2008-09), which depicts the artist at different moments throughout her life, and Portrait of an Image (with Isabelle Huppert) (2005-06), where Horn has photographed actress Isabelle Huppert posing as characters from her films.

Sculptures in the exhibition include works from the series When Dickinson Shut Her Eyes (1993-2008), where Roni Horn has recreated poems by Emily Dickinson; Gold Field (1980/1994), a work composed of 99.99% gold foil; and Untitled (“The tiniest piece of mirror is always the whole mirror.”) (2022), a ten-unit solid cast glass work that reflects its surrounding environment.

RONI HORN

Roni Horn was born in New York in 1955. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1975. In 1978, Roni Horn graduated with a master’s degree in sculpture from Yale University. Her oeuvre focuses on conceptually oriented photography, sculpture, drawing, and books. Since 1975, Roni Horn has traveled extensively in the more remote landscapes of Iceland. These solitary experiences have long been important influences in her life and work. Literature and Roni Horn’s prodigious reading have had a similarly profound impact on her work across various media.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Tate Modern, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria; Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; Fundació Joan Miro, Barcelona; De Pont Foundation, Tilburg, The Netherlands; Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland; Glenstone Museum, Potomac, MD; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, TX; Pola Museum of Art, Hakone, Japan; Bourse de Commerce – Pi­nault Collection, Paris; Winsing Arts Foundation, Taipeh; Centro Botín, Santander, Spain; He Art Museum, Guangdong, China. This year, in addition to the exhibition at Museum Ludwig, Roni Horn have a major solo show at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark.

Roni Horn: Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death   

The exhibition is accompanied by the catalogue Roni Horn: Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death, ed. by Yilmaz Dziewior; with text contributions by Yilmaz Dziewior, Zoë Lescaze, Andrew Maerkle, Isabel de Naverán, and Kerstin Stakemeier; German/English. Hard­cover, 312 pages, 21.5 × 27.5 cm, approx. 180 col. ill., Steidl Verlag, Co-published with the Museum Ludwig - ISBN 978-3-96999-379-8

MUSEUM LUDWIG, COLOGNE 

Heinrich-Böll-Platz, 50667 Köln 

www.museum-ludwig.de 

Roni Horn @ Peder Lund Gallery, Oslo - Wits’ End Mash

Roni Horn: Wits’ End Mash

Peder Lund Gallery, Oslo 

Through 27 November 2021

Portrait of Roni Horn photographed by Mario Sorrenti

Photo Courtesy of Peder Lund, Oslo

Peder Lund presents a new exhibition by the American artist RONI HORN (b. 1955). On display are six fascinating drawings and a fantastic glass sculpture. 

For more than 40 years, Roni Horn has worked with a wide range of media, ranging from photography, drawing, sculptural installations and performance, to artist’s books and text. Roni Horn’s work embodies matters such as the mutable nature of identity and that of the natural world and the relationship between subject and object in the perception of art and nature. Across the multidisciplinary formal approaches, she has employed throughout her oeuvre, Roni Horn has remained focused and her subject matters well articulated.

RONI HORN 

Wits’ End Mash (Rome wasn't built in a day), 2019 (detail)

Courtesy of Peder Lund, Oslo

Presented at Peder Lund are six works on paper from Roni Horn's important series Wits’ End Mash (2019). These works are comprised of 75-350 idioms and clichés hand-written by different individuals who were asked to write down their favorite idiomatic expressions. Phrases like “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” “swimming with the fishes” or “lose my head” were then selected by the artist and the original handwritten texts were individually silkscreened on paper into unique clouds of words. Previously, a related body of work, Wits’ End Sampler (2018), was presented at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, TX, USA in 2018/2019. As the curator, Michelle White analyses, the artist’s work “marks moments when language fails and connotation migrates, or when dictionaries and indexes and libraries of water don’t work as empirical fact.” [Michelle white, "RONI HORN WAS HERE," in Roni Horn: Wit's End, Göttingen : Steidl, 2021).

RONI HORN

Installation view, Roni Horn, Wits’ End Mash, 

Peder Lund, Oslo, Norway, 2021

Courtesy of Peder Lund, Oslo

Another body of work by the artist that challenges the notion of classification is of course her renowned glass sculptures since glass is neither liquid nor solid, but an amorphous liquid-solid that exists between those two states of matter, with atoms moving too slowly for its condition of constant change to be visible. By virtue of this extraordinary duality, glass is an ideal medium for Roni Horn’s exploration of the shifting grounds of meaning and identity. At display at Peder Lund is the mesmerizing sculptural work, Untitled (“And Chikatilo?’ I ask him.”What was your moment of breakthrough?’ A half lowering of the heavy eyelids, a small sigh. ‘The reek of his breath,’ he replies, after a long pull at his cigarette. ‘Chikatilo ate the private parts of his victims. Over time it effected his digestion.’”), (2013-17). The title quote for this work comes from The Pigeon Tunnel (2016) which comprises a collection of memoirs by the British-Irish novelist John le Carré. This glass sculpture is a prime example from the artist’s oeuvre – similar works are for example held by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland, Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom, and LACMA, Los Angeles, CA, USA. 

On 30 September 2021, the Norwegian Public Roads Administration has opened a new Scenic Route installation by Ron Horn in Havøysund, Northern Norway. The permanent art installation Untitled (“I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness.”), consists of two glass objects from 2013-15, in a wooden pavilion designed by architect Jan Olav Jensen in collaboration with Roni Horn, completed in 2021.

Roni Horn’s numerous solo exhibitions include shows organised by The Pola Museum of Art, Hakone, Japan, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA, The Drawing Institute at The Melin Collection, Houston, TX, USA, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland, and Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover, Germany. A major retrospective titled Roni Horn aka Roni Horn was organised by Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom and travelled to Collection Lambert, Avignon, France, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, USA in 2009/2010. Her work has been exhibited in several Reykjavik venues, as well as in group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA (1991 and 2004), Documenta 9, Kassel, Germany (1992), Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (1997 and 2003), and Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, Australia (1998 and 2014). Roni Horn has received various awards, among them a Ford Foundation grant (1978), and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1984, 1986, and 1990) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1990). In 2013, she was awarded the Joan Miró Prize.

Roni Horn’s work is featured in numerous major international institutions and collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, Kunsthalle Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany, Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA and Tate, London, United Kingdom.   

PEDER LUND

Tjuvholmen allé 27, 0252 Oslo

pederlund.no

Roni Horn @ Peder Lund, Oslo

Roni Horn
Peder Lund, Oslo
Through September 14, 2019

Peder Lund presents a new exhibition by the American artist RONI HORN (b. 1955). On display are a delicate gold sculpture and two series of drawings.

For more than thirty years, Roni Horn has worked with a wide range of media, ranging from photography, drawing, sculptural installations and performance, to artist’s books and text. Horn’s work concerns matters such as the mutable nature of identity and that of the natural world, as well as the relationship between subject and object in the perception of art and nature. Across the multidisciplinary formal approaches she has employed throughout her oeuvre, Roni Horn has remained focused and her concepts well-articulated. 

Installed at Peder Lund are four triptychs from her important series Dogs’ Chorus (2016).  In conjunction with the gallery exhibition in Oslo, the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston is currently exhibiting other works from this same series as part of the exhibition Roni Horn: When I Breathe, I Draw, Part II (June 7 – September 1, 2019).  Each drawing is based on the phrase “Let slip the dogs of war” from William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599) plus a familiar idiom, proverb or metaphor such as “Every Tom, Dick or Harry" or “From the frying pan into the fire.” The artist created each drawing by cutting apart her original drawings of texts and reassembling the fragments. Through Roni Horn’s delicate cut and paste technique the clichés fall apart; the failed communication that is the origin of every conflict explodes colorfully on the paper, transformed into comical and complex, watercolored bubbles of thoughts. Michelle White, the Senior Curator at the Menil Collection, explains that the artist describes her drawings as “a conversation with herself – that points to the mutability of meaning and identity.” 

How language and identity are intertwined is also the focus of the second series of drawings. The work Alias Frieze, v. 1 (2011) consists of 12 drawings in which the words “also known as” are repeated with variations in their order and coloring. The words are arranged in a straight line, causing the different sized frames in which they are presented to go slightly up and down, following symbolically the ever-changing personality that the viewer can associate with the presented pseudonym. 

The scupltural work on display, the gold Double Mobius, v. 2 (2009/2018), references of course, a Mobius strip, a geometrical form that despite appearing to have two sides, only has one. This work is a rare example from the artist’s oeuvre – Roni Horn has produced very few gold sculptures over the course of her long carrier. However, in contrast to her earlier works with this material, such as Gold Field (1980-82) and Paired Gold Mats, for Ross and Felix (1994-95), the two ribbons of thin gold foil comprising Double Mobius, v. 2 are placed at eye level, allowing the viewer to experience the mesmerizing, physical quality of this material up close. 

Roni Horn’s numerous solo exhibitions include shows organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (1990); Kunstmuseum Winterthur (1993); Kunsthalle Basel and Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (1995); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1999); Dia Center for the Arts, New York (2001); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2003); and Art Institute of Chicago (2004). A major retrospective titled Roni Horn aka Roni Horn was organised by Tate Modern, London, and travelled to Collection Lambert, Avignon, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2009-10). Her work has been exhibited in several Reykjavik venues, as well as in group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial (1991 and 2004); Documenta 9 (1992), Venice Biennale (1997 and 2003); and Biennale of Sydney (1998 and 2014). Horn has received various awards, among them a Ford Foundation grant (1978), and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1984, 1986, and 1990) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1990). In 2013, she was awarded the Joan Miró Prize. Horn’s work is featured in numerous major international institutions and collections including the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; Tate Modern, London; Kunsthalle Hamburg; Kunsthaus Zürich; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

PEDER LUND
Tjuvholmen allé 27, 0252 Oslo
pederlund.no