Roni Horn
Roni Horn
born 1955
Always intent to maintain the integrity of her chosen materials, be it solid glass, literature, or the volcanic topography of Iceland, Horn created complex relationships between the viewer and her work. She was less interested in the meaning of the work (the ‘why’ and ‘what’) and more in the interaction of action and being the ‘how’, ultimately creating art that unites both.
Her series of aluminium sculptures, which feature fragments from the writings of Franz Kafka and Emily Dickinson, such as Kafka’s Palindrome (1991–4) or Keys and Cues (1994), are reminiscent of the Minimalist sculptures of Donald Judd and Michael Fried’s famous definition of Minimalist art as ‘literal art’. However, Horn’s ‘literal’ transfer of words onto matter changes the meaning of both the original words and the materials used: taken out of context, the meaning of the original words becomes amalgamated with the meaning embedded in the material. By adding literacy to matter, the sculpture becomes nonliteral, but not devoid of content.
Her photographic installation You Are the Weather (1994–5), consisting of close-ups a young woman’s face taken in thermals pools in Iceland during various weather conditions, juxtaposes the transient character of human existence with the unpredictability of nature, while later sequences of ten photographs, Untitled (Isabelle Huppert) (2005), depict the elusive nature of identity through various moods and facial expressions performed by the actress.
Arguably Horn’s most acclaimed works are her series of photographs of the Icelandic landscape, which are both published in book form and exhibited as large-scale installations, such as Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Tate Modern, London, in 2009: a comprehensive survey of approximately 70 works that varied in scale from small drawings to room-sized photographic installations to sculptures and explored the fluid relationship between media in Horn’s works.
[Source: Oxford Art Online http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T096849?q=roni+horn&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit]
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