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The Whitney Museum Presents Thirty-Year Survey of Work by Roni Horn aka Roni Horn |
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| Written by Mark Godfrey |
| Saturday, 07 November 2009 01:17 |
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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 curators, who are working in close collaboration with Horn, are the Whitney’s Chief Curator and Associate Director for Programs Donna De Salvo and curator of drawings Carter E. Foster, and Mark Godfrey, curator at Tate Modern. As De Salvo, Foster, and Godfrey write in their introduction to the exhibition catalogue, “One of the most compelling reasons to look back now at Horn’s work is to see how she has consistently addressed ideas about subjectivity and multiplicity while giving profound attention to materials and creating works of great beauty. There is an unwavering intensity in Horn’s ability to reconcile materials with personal experience. In a time of isolation and fragmentation, Horn’s singular and unrelenting focus on an object or an image demands much from viewers, but her work equally offers ample rewards to those willing to take the time to become a part of it.” For more than thirty years, Horn has been developing work of concentrated visual power and intellectual rigor, often 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 – often 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 the genres of portraiture and landscape. Image-specific photographic portraits and ethereally beautiful abstract cast glass sculpture relay aspects of both. Similarly, Horn’s intricately cut and pigmented drawings suggest something of the elemental nature 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.  Iceland has been a place of continual inspiration to the
artist. Since 1990 Horn has produced an extraordinary series of books titled To
Place with photographs of lava, geysers, glacial rivers, and hot pools, which
will be presented. As Horn is quoted in the catalogue, “As a mass produced,
portable object…the book goes out into the world, ultimately locating itself
into the world where it is most desired.” Horn’s interest in writing and
language is also reflected in her sculptures in which lines from Emily
Dickinson’s writings are structurally embedded into aluminum rods. These
machined, minimal pieces relate back in turn to sculptural installations like
Things that Happen Again, for Two Rooms, which similarly uses an industrial
process as a way to objectify language and give the viewer room for
interpretation. Horn’s work has an undeniable material presence, a seductive,
sensual beauty. Her means may seem simple, but her basic concerns with the
nature of representation and the role played by the mind and subjectivity are
deeply philosophical. Major photographic works illustrate 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 forty-eight paired photographs of Horn’s young niece as she plays with different identities and grows into adulthood. Cabinet Of (2001) comprises thirty-six 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 one hundred close-up photographs of a woman immersed in Iceland's hot pools in changing climatic conditions, her features responding to the weather. A large range of Horn's drawings are included in the exhibition, from her 1982 series Bluff Life to more recent works made from cutting and reconfiguring lines of pure pigment on expansive surfaces. Approaching them, their initial appearance shifts as one begins to look at the details of Horn’s cuts and pencil marks. Writing about the exhibition in its earlier, critically acclaimed incarnation at Tate Modern, Rachel Campbell-Johnston noted in the (London) Times: “Horn’s work moves (rather than develops) in a way that we can never quite predict. She never allows us to feel too familiar or certain of our assumptions…To walk through this show is to walk into a world of constant reflections…Horn’s art is to show you something that you cannot see.” And in The Guardian, Adrian Searle wrote, “The complications multiply; the paradox is how simple Horn’s art at first appears…For all the airiness and feeling of space, the show still gives us Horn’s breadth and range.” 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. Visit : http://whitney.org/index.php Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~ |
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