Roni Horn

4 APRIL – 12 JULY 2024

New York, Wooster Street

On 4 April, Hauser & Wirth will open an exhibition of new works by Roni Horn at the gallery’s Wooster Street location in New York City. Renowned for a practice that combines conceptual rigor with an exquisite visual sensuality, Horn will present her latest series of works on paper and never before exhibited cast-glass sculptures. Highlighting her enduring exploration of identity, meaning and perception, these works continue to reveal Horn’s deeply conscientious engagement in humanity’s relationship to the natural world.

Drawing has been integral to Horn’s oeuvre for nearly 40 years. Describing it as her ‘primary activity,’ she expands the language of mark-making by constructing, deconstructing and then reconstructing images and texts. A meditation on meaning, Horn’s unique process of taking things apart and putting them back together anew tests the limits of draftsmanship by exploring its sculptural potential. For her latest series, titled ‘Slarips’ (the word ‘spirals’ written in reverse), Horn began by making watercolor spirals in an array of hues. She then cut up the painted images and collaged them together into new tessellated compositions. Each is titled with a deliberate misspelling of the word ‘spirals,’ signaling a profound departure from the work’s original source material.

The artist began making cast-glass sculptures in the mid-1990s, pouring colored molten glass into molds that would then gradually anneal over the course of several months. Horn spent years developing a specific technical process that furnishes her finished works with a nearly alchemical quality: they appear simultaneously fluid and solid. Visually ambiguous, their opaque, roughly textured sides bear impressions of the molds in which they were cast, while their glossy, fire-polished tops recall the crystal-clear surface of an undisturbed pool of water. Water, often considered a universal symbol for change, is a constant theme for Horn, once stating she is ‘…fascinated by this idea of water as a form of perpetual relation, not so much a substance but a thing whose identity was based on its relation to other things…. Rather than an object, water becomes a metaphor for consciousness—of time, of physicality, of the human condition.’

Roni Horn International Exhibitions

GIVE ME PARADOX OR GIVE ME DEATH

MUSEUM LUDWIG

23 MARCH – 11 AUGUST 2024

THE DETOUR OF IDENTITY

LOUISIANA MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

2 MAY – 1 SEPTEMBER 2024

RONI HORN

HAUSER & WIRTH MENORCA

11 MAY – 27 OCTOBER 2024

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About the Artist

Roni Horn

La obra de Roni Horn se caracteriza por la incertidumbre y la imposibilidad de concluirla. En toda su obra es importante su interés por la naturaleza mutable de la identidad, el significado y la percepción, así como la noción de duplicidad, cuestiones que siguen impulsando la práctica de Horn.

Current Exhibitions