American Artist Roni Horn Exhibition for Kunsthaus Bregenz

Written by Winfred Zolmann Sunday, 25 April 2010 20:21

BREGENZ, AUSTRIA - Roni Horn (b. 1955 in New York) has achieved international recognition as a prominent and influential contemporary artist. Since the early 1970s she has worked across artistic forms, producing sculpture, photographs, artist books, and drawings. Because she chooses not to privilege any one medium, her art defies easy categorization. Materials – used with remarkable virtuosity and sensitivity – take on metaphorical qualities and relate key themes with great visual power. On view 24 April through 4 July, 2010. The exhibition entitled 'Well and Truly', conceived by Roni Horn specifically for the Kunsthaus Bregenz, is the first comprehensive one-person show by the internationally renowned New York artist in Austria.

One important aspect of her practice is an exploration of the possibilities of language as sculptural form. In cuboid or rod-shaped sculptures made of copper and polished aluminum Horn incorporates fragments of texts by Emily Dickinson or Franz Kafka. A selection from this series entitled “White Dickinsons” will be on view at the Kunsthaus Bregenz.

The exhibition will also include a new glass work, “Well and Truly” (2009), which is comprised of several objects installed over an entire floor. Additionally, the Kunsthaus will present the photo installation “a.k.a.,” (2008/09). This recently-completed piece consists of 15 portrait pairs of photographs collected over the course of several decades by the artist.

Another central medium in Roni Horn’s oeuvre is her work on paper. Drawing plays a key role in the artist’s creative process and, as she herself says, is the starting point for her work across all media. For her works on paper, which are generally very large-format, she dissects pigment drawings, assembling the individual parts into new forms – a method entailing aspects of collage technique. Large-format examples from this important group of works will be on show in Bregenz.

Experienced all together, the recurring motifs of doubling and identity in each of these material genres reveal a broader link between portraiture and landscape, time and matter.

Roni Horn was born in New York in 1955, and lives and works in New York. She received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale University. Horn explores the mutable nature of art through sculptures, works on paper, photography, and books. She describes drawing as the key activity in all her work because drawing is about composing relationships. Horn’s drawings concentrate on the materiality of the objects depicted. She also uses words as the basis for drawings and other works. Horn crafts complex relationships between the viewer and her work by installing a single piece on opposing walls, in adjoining rooms, or throughout a series of buildings. She subverts the notion of ‘identical experience’, insisting that one’s sense of self is marked by a place in the here-and-there, and by time in the now-and-then. She describes her artworks as site-dependent, expanding upon the idea of site-specificity associated with Minimalism.

Visit Kunsthaus Bregenz at : http://www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at/

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