Media Release Roni Horn October 2, 2016 – January 1, 2017 The exhibition by American artist Roni Horn (*1955 in New York) features outstanding groups of works and series she has created over the last twenty years. The photographic installations, works on paper, and sculptures made of cast glass displayed in the six rooms devoted to the show can be experienced as a coherent installation. The exhibition “Roni Horn” has been developed in close cooperation with the artist for the space at the Fondation Beyeler. Several new works are being presented for the first time. Roni Horn’s art focuses on the idea of identity and mutability. In her works, Horn succeeds in subtly exploring fixed attributions and in emphasizing ephemerality and diversity. They show how the essence of things can differ from their visual appearance. It is therefore no coincidence that she uses materials like glass or subjects like water or weather, which are multifaceted and have a form and natural state that are subject to change. Her ideas take on visible forms centered on the experiences they enable. Her playful approach to language and literature endows the images she creates with an even broader range of meaning. Roni Horn has travelled regularly to Iceland since 1975. The uniquely rugged landscape, the extremely changeable weather conditions, and the country’s remoteness are her main sources of inspiration: “Big enough to get lost on. Small enough to find myself.” The curator of the exhibition is Theodora Vischer, Senior Curator at the Fondation Beyeler. The “Roni Horn” exhibition is being supported by: Beyeler-Stiftung Hansjörg Wyss, Wyss-Foundation Helen and Chuck Schwab Press images: are available for download at http://pressimages.fondationbeyeler.ch Further information: Elena DelCarlo, M.A. Head of Communications Tel. + 41 (0)61 645 97 21, [email protected], www.fondationbeyeler.ch Fondation Beyeler, Beyeler Museum AG, Baselstrasse 77, CH-4125 Riehen, Switzerland Fondation Beyeler opening hours: 10 am - 6 pm daily, Wednesdays until 8 pm Media Release Roni Horn October 2, 2016 – January 1, 2017 The exhibition by American artist Roni Horn (*1955 in New York) features outstanding groups of works and series she has created over the last twenty years. The photographic installations, works on paper, and sculptures made of cast glass displayed in the six rooms devoted to the show can be experienced as a coherent installation. The exhibition “Roni Horn” has been developed in close cooperation with the artist for the space at the Fondation Beyeler. Around half the works on show are new ones that are being exhibited for the first time. Roni Horn’s art focuses on the idea of identity and mutability, demonstrating that the essence of things can differ from their visual appearance. In her works, Horn succeeds in subtly exploring fixed attributions, and in conveying ephemerality and diversity. It is therefore no coincidence that she uses materials like glass and motifs like water and the weather, all of which are multifaceted and have a form and natural state subject to constant change. Horn gives visible form to such ideas in her work. Her playful approach to language and literature endows the images she creates with an even broader range of meaning. Since the early 1980s, drawing, particularly with pigment, is a medium repeatedly used by Roni Horn. Ten of the most significant monumental pigment drawings she has created during the past decade have been brought together for the exhibition from collections in the United States, Mexico, Norway and Switzerland. For these large-format works on paper (each measuring around 2 x 3 meters), Horn created several similar abstract drawings which she cut up cleanly with a knife, and then assembled into a larger picture. The extremely delicate line structure of these works develops an extraordinary pull on viewers, seeming to draw them into the work. That impression is reinforced by the works’ apparently porous surface, the luminous mineral pigments, and the notes delicately added in pencil afterwards. The very recent works on paper from the series entitled Th Rose Prblm, 2015–16, which demonstrate Roni Horn’s creative engagement with language and literature, are drawings of a different kind. The process of cutting and assembly is the same, but the initial pictures here are water colors of phrases in which the word “rose” appears. For Th Rose Prblm, Horn breaks up these phrases and rearranges the parts into a total of 48 colored, often slightly bizarre textual meanings. Filling an entire room, a veritable rose garden awaits visitors. Two extensive photographic installations, a.k.a., 2008–09 and the new work The Selected Gifts, (1974–2015), 2015–16, show Roni Horn’s engagement with the genre of portrait. In the first case, she alludes to the multiple aspects of a person’s identity through a non-chronological juxtaposition of portraits of herself from different periods in her life. In the second, a possible portrait of the artist is formed through photographically documented objects given to her by friends and acquaintances over the last 40 years. The series Still Water (The River Thames, for Example), which was completed in 1999 and which has been loaned by the Kunsthaus Zürich, is also a portrait – albeit of a river. By means of 15 photographs of the Thames’s surface, the color and structure of which are never the same, as well as short passages of text, Roni Horn addresses the stories, moods and memories of the River Thames. “I think of my images of the Thames as a mirror. All the associative images that coalesce around this work, whether it is the similarity of the water with the desert or with aspic, the endless range of imagery is the result of photographing something that is a master chameleon. Or the ultimate mime. The ultimate mime is the thing that keeps its distinction from everything else. When you think about that fact – of imitation or reflection and the possibility of losing your identity in that connection – you realize how water never loses its identity, it is always discretely itself.” [Roni Horn, 2007.] The mutability of a material as it is made perceptible in Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) using the motif of water is also a theme of Horn’s sculptural work. Her newly created glass sculptures Water Double, v.1–3, 2013–16 convey the impression that the cylindrical objects are filled with water. Their surface can be transparent down to the bottom but can at the same time also show your reflection. However, it is not water but solely the characteristics of the material – massive glass that has been poured and cooled – that create this illusion. The impression of Horn’s works in glass varies according to prevailing light and meteorological conditions, seeming in some cases even to be illuminated from within. Looking at them thus becomes a constantly changing and spectacular experience. The exhibition is being curated by Theodora Vischer, Senior Curator at the Fondation Beyeler. Roni Horn was born in 1955 in New York City and grew up in Rockland County in the U.S. state of New York. Today Roni Horn lives and works in New York and in Reykjavik, Iceland. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design from 1972 to 1975, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. At the age of twenty, she first travelled to Iceland, a country that proved to be of great importance for her subsequent artistic work. From 1976 to 1978 she studied for a Master of Fine Arts at Yale University, specializing in sculpture. After the completion of her studies, an Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship, the most generously endowed fellowship awarded by Yale University, enabled her to tour Iceland by motorcycle for a period of several months. She regularly returned there in the decades that followed. The country’s remoteness, the extremely volatile weather conditions, and the uniquely rugged landscape, which is constantly changing due to geothermal and volcanic activity, have remained key sources of inspiration for her right up until today. Horn has described her relationship to Iceland in the following way: “I have used this place as an open-air studio of unlimited scale and newness. In retrospect I see that I have chosen Iceland the way another artist might choose marble as the substance of one’s work. Iceland taught me to taste experience. Because that’s possible here, because of the intensely physical nature of experience on this island.” [Roni Horn, 2006.] The series of publications entitled To Place of which Horn produced the first in 1990 is her most explicit response to Iceland. The different volumes include drawings and photographs of geysers, glacial rivers, lava and hot springs. The ten volumes that have appeared so far will also be presented in the exhibition. For many years now, Roni Horn’s work has been shown in solo exhibitions held in leading modern and contemporary art museums in the United States and Europe: it was displayed in 1995 at the Kunsthalle Basel, in 1998 at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, in 2000 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 2002 at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York, and in 2003 at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Further major exhibitions were held in 2009 at Tate Modern, London, in 2010 at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, in 2011 at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, in 2012 at the Sammlung Goetz, Munich, in 2013 at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main, in 2014 at the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, in 2015 at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles, and in early 2016 at the De Pont Museum, Tilburg.