Roni Horn
21 May – 1 August 2026
London
For her first exhibition in London in a decade, Roni Horn will present never before exhibited works on paper from her new Seizure of Hope series, which explores Horn’s preoccupation with repetition and the utilization of the written word as a medium. Accompanying her drawings is one of her renowned glass sculptures; taking the form of a cube, the work is a rare example of Horn’s cast objects.
Underpinning her wider practice, drawing is a primary activity that has been integral to Horn’s oeuvre for nearly 40 years. Featuring throughout the works on view, the phrase ‘I am paralyzed with hope’ comes from a monologue by the stand-up comedian Maria Bamford, which Horn describes as a ‘poignant connection to our time with regards to politics and the environment and now, of course, in relation to the pandemic.’ Bamford’s quote was first used by the artist in her 2021 work ‘LOG (22 March 2019 – 17 May 2020),’ a large-scale installation comprised of 406 individual works on paper that function as a record of the world around her, and evolved into the Seizure of Hope series on view.
Evoking water damaged ink, the text is at once legible and blurred. Her cast-glass sculpture ‘Untitled (“What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?”)’ (2022) similarly balances solidity and fluidity, its glossy top recalling the crystal-clear surface of an undisturbed pool of water. Water is a constant theme for Horn, 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 aka Roni Horn’ (Steidl & Partners, 2009)
The exhibition is accompanied by the limited-edition title ‘Seizure of Hope’ (2026) by Hauser & Wirth Publishers, an artist’s book that reproduces her drawings in precise detail.
Image: Roni Horn, Seizure of Hope (71) (detail), 2025 © Roni Horn. Photo: Ron Amstutz
Roni Horn: Seizure of Hope
This meticulously designed, limited-edition publication collects a series of drawings that were inspired by a line from a monologue by the American comedian Maria Bamford: ‘I am paralyzed with hope.’ Horn felt that the statement resonated with contemporary anxieties, and she began to write and rewrite it, drawing over the words with a wax crayon that caused their letters to bleed.
‘Seizure of Hope’ is a spectacular record of Horn’s arresting meditation on language, emotion and the nature of hope.
About the Artist
Roni Horn
Roni Horn’s work consistently generates uncertainty to thwart closure. Important across her oeuvre is her longstanding interest to the protean nature of identity, meaning, and perception, as well as the notion of doubling; issues which continue to propel Horn’s practice.
Since the mid-1990s, Horn has been producing cast-glass sculptures. For these works, colored molten glass assumes the shape and qualities of a mold as it gradually anneals over several months. The sides and bottom of the resulting sculpture are left with the rough translucent impression of the mold in which it was cast. By stark contrast, the top surface is fire-polished and slightly bows like liquid under tension. The seductively glossy surface invites the viewer to gaze into the optically pristine interior of the sculpture, as if looking down on a body of water through an aqueous oculus. Exposed to the reflections from the sun or to the shadows of an overcast day, Horn’s glass sculpture relies upon natural elements like the weather to manifest her binary experimentations in color, weight and lightness, solidity and fluidity. The endless subtle shifts in the work’s appearance place it in an eternal state of mutability, as it refuses a fixed visual identity. Begetting solidity and singularity, the changing appearance of her sculptures is where one discovers meaning and connects her work to the concept of identity.
For Horn, drawing is a primary activity that underpins her wider practice. Her intricate works on paper examine recurring themes of interpretation, mirroring and textual play, which coalesce to explore the materiality of color and the sculptural potential of drawing. Horn’s preoccupation with language also permeates these works; her scattered words read as a stream of consciousness spiralling across the paper. In her ‘Hack Wit’ series, Horn reconfigures idiomatic turns of phrase and proverbs to engender nonsensical, jumbled expressions. The themes of pairing and mirroring emerge as she intertwines not only the phrases themselves but also the paper they are inscribed on, so that her process reflects the content of the drawings. Words are her images and she paints them expressionistically, which—combined with her method—causes letters to appear indeterminate, as if they are being viewed underwater.
Notions of identity and mutability are also explored within Horn’s photography, which tends to consist of multiple pieces and installed as a surround which unfolds within the gallery space. Examples include her series ‘The Selected Gifts, (1974 - 2015),’ photographed with a deceptively affectless approach that belies sentimental value. Here, Horn’s collected treasures float against pristine white backdrops in the artist’s signature serial style, telling a story of the self as mediated through both objects and others—what the artist calls ‘a vicarious self-portrait.’ This series, alongside her other photographic projects, build upon her explorations into the effects of multiplicity on perception and memory, and the implications of repetition and doubling, which remain central to her work.
Current Exhibitions
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