Roni Horn

by Lynne Cooke, Thierry Duve, Louise Neri

American artist Roni Horn (b.1955) is revered around the globe for the understated force of her beautifully composed works of art. She has concentrated on a small, highly personal selection of subjects. For instance, the tradition of Minimalist sculpture and our response to it is transferred with great sensitivity into her artwork.  Asphere III , for example, looks like a solid copper in fact it is slightly distorted and thus asymmetrical. Horn frustrates our notions of contemporary sculpture, sharpening our awareness of experiencing the work and offering a heightened sense of environment and presence in the world. Horn's care for detail and poetic subtlety have made her one of the world's most respected artists.  Her use of poetry - such as William Blake's  Tyger, Tyger  or works by Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens - contradict the mass-produced look of the sculptures. One work,  You Are the Weather  (1994-5) involves numerous photographs of a young woman in the hot springs of Iceland. In this series of many nearly identical portraits with slight, barely perceptible differences in natural lighting, Horn mimics the serialization of Minimalist art for highly personal, even erotic imagery.

Independent curator and editor Louise Neri examines in her Survey the intricate themes and structures of Horn's complex body of work, which never the less retains its simplicity and directness. New-York-based curator Lynne Cooke discusses with the artist the recurring conceptual concerns across different media. Belgian art theorist Theirry de Duve focusses on the enigma of identity in the photographic installation  You Are the Weather  (1994-5), a series of 100 nearly identically composed portraits of a young woman bathing in Iceland, which reveal varying locations, emotions and atmospheric conditions to the attentive viewer. The artist has selected a short extract from the story 'The Apple in the Dark' (1967) by the Jewish Ukranian-born Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector (1920-77). For Lispector, as for Horn, intense attention to objects and places is combined with a careful study of the role of language in perception. This volume contains the most comprehensive collection yet published of Roni Horn's eloquent writing on her own work and its influences.

Genres: Art

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Lynne Cooke is the Senior Curator, Special Projects in Modern Art, at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Prior to her present position, she was the deputy director and chief curator at the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain, (2008 to 2012) and the curator at the Dia Art Foundation (1991 to 2008). Born in Geelong, Australia, Cooke received her B.A. from Melbourne University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from the Courtauld Institute, University of London, and has taught and lectured regularly at the University College London, Syracuse University, Yale University, Columbia University, and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. She was a co-curator of the Venice Biennale in 1986, the Carnegie International in 1991, and was artistic director of the Biennale of Sydney in 1996.

From 1979 to 1989, Cooke was a Lecturer in the History of Art Department at University College London, and prior to her move to the United States and appointment as curator at the Dia Art Foundation in 1991, Dr. Cooke established herself during the mid-80s as a writer on contemporary artists of the period, including British sculptors Anish Kapoor and Bill Woodrow, and American artist Allan McCollum. During her years at Dia, she has worked to bring greater recognition to women artists who contributed to the minimalist period, organizing exhibitions and publishing writings on Jo Baer, Louise Bourgeois, Bridget Riley, and Agnes Martin, among others; and in addition to developing historical projects with artists of the established Dia collection, nearly all of whom are male and became prominent during the 1960s, she has organized significant exhibitions aimed at introducing European artists of the 1980s to the American public, such as Rosemarie Trockel, Katharina Fritsch, Juan Muñoz, and Thomas Schütte.

From the mid-1990s forward, Cooke has organized a number of exhibitions of younger American women artists, including Jessica Stockholder, Ann Hamilton, and Roni Horn, and worked on several projects with male artists all born outside of the United States. In addition to her work at the Dia Center for the Arts, she has curated exhibitions at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol; Whitechapel Art Gallery and Hayward Gallery, London; Third Eye Center, Glasgow; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Tamayo Museum, Mexico; and elsewhere. In 2006, she was the recipient of the Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and in 2007, she co-curated the exhibition "Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years," at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has written widely about contemporary art in exhibition catalogues and in Artforum, Artscribe, The Burlington Magazine, and Parkett, among other magazines.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Her writings are a little too affected, seem too much like she's trying to uncover deep truths, but the work is thoughtful. The work has a lot there.

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Roni Horn and because she is so smart the interview and writings are awesome. This book includes amazing images of projects that don't exist anymore and are hard to find. Radical!