Roni Horn: Recent Work

‘Roni Horn. Recent Work’ presents the artist’s latest achievements in the realm of drawing, a medium she has described as ‘a kind of breathing activity on a daily level.’ Here, intricate works on paper extend Horn’s masterful use of mirroring and textual play to explore the materiality of color and the sculptural potential of the medium. Her preoccupation with language permeates these works; scattered words read as a stream of consciousness spiraling across the paper.

In the artist’s Wits’ End Mash series, Horn’s use of image and language as subject matter acquires new potency. For these large-scale drawings, Horn has individually silkscreened approximately 300 handwritten sayings to overlap en masse on single sheets.

In addition to pieces from her series Wits’ End Mash and Yet, the exhibition will present for the first time LOG (March 22, 2019 – May 17, 2020), (2019 – 2020), a new large-scale installation comprised of more than 400 individual works on paper, the result of a daily ritual of art making undertaken by Horn for a span of fourteen months.

We invite you to explore all 406 pages of Roni Horn’s artwork, ‘LOG (March 22, 2019–May 17, 2020)’.

‘Recent Work’ also spotlight’s Horn’s Yet series, in which drawings composed with graphite and powdered pigment become ‘plates’ that the artist dissects, splices, and reassembles into final compositions. In such works as ‘Yet 10’ (2017/2020), this process is visible in the way pencil marks, numbers, and words are interspersed between shards of color blocks and Horn’s annotations in the joining of plates within each drawing. Having first undertaken this unique pigment process in the early 1980s, Horn continually redefines the ways in which it can be used to lend physicality and depth to the practice of drawing.

‘Recent Work’ follows the artist’s two-part 2019 drawing survey ‘Roni Horn: When I Breathe, I Draw’ at the Menil Collection in Houston. Her work has been the subject of numerous major exhibitions including ‘Roni Horn’ at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2016); ‘Roni Horn a.k.a Roni Horn,’ organized by the Tate Modern, London, which travelled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2009 – 2010). Roni Horn lives and works in New York.

Using drawing, photography, installation, sculpture and literature, Roni Horn’s work consistently questions and generates uncertainty to thwart closure in her work, engaging with many different concerns and materials. 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.

Roni Horn, New York, 2011. Photo: Juergen Teller

‘Roni Horn. Recent Work’ is open for timed viewing appointments. To book a timed viewing appointment, please make a reservation here. Viewing appointments will be released on a weekly basis. Please review viewing guidelines prior to your visit.