- Original name:
- Rose Horn
Roni Horn
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Roni Horn (born September 24, 1955, New York, New York, U.S.) is an American conceptual sculptor, installation artist, draftsperson, photographer, and writer who is perhaps best known for her Iceland-based body of work. She has described her art as “consistently generat[ing] uncertainty to thwart closure” and said that she has a “longstanding interest [in] the protean nature of identity, meaning, and perception, as well as the notion of doubling.”
Early life and art
Horn was originally named Rose Horn, the namesake of both of her grandmothers. “When I was young,” she told W magazine in 2009, “I decided that my sex, my gender, was nobody’s business,” so she began going by the more gender-neutral name Roni Horn. At age 16 Horn left high school and enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA, 1975). She studied sculpture and drawing and graduated in 1978 with an MFA from Yale University’s School of Art.
Art inspired by Iceland: You Are the Weather and Library of Water
Beginning in 1975 Horn traveled often to Iceland, taking in the mutability of its weather and landscape, which would influence and be the setting for much of her work. One example is Horn’s well-known You Are the Weather (1994–95) series. It consists of 100 close-up photographs of a woman’s face, documenting the subtle changes in the subject’s appearance as she reacts to different types of weather. Another Iceland-based work (located in a former library in the small town of Stykkishólmur) is Library of Water (2003–07), an installation of 24 glass columns containing water, each one sourced from a unique glacier. The floor of the installation is covered with weather-related words in both Icelandic and English.
Text-based art
Like Library of Water many of Horn’s other works integrate text. Notable examples include Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) (1999), in which images of the River Thames include numbers related to footnotes that provide a context and the artist’s insight, and the Key and Cue series (1990s), which features aluminum columns printed with lines of poetry by Emily Dickinson, a poet Horn has described as an important influence.
Photo series
In addition to You Are the Weather, Horn’s other photographic series includes This Is Me, This Is You (1997–2000), comprising a collection of photographs taken of Horn’s niece, Georgia, during a period of about two years. The series captures the adolescent’s variable moods as she is waking up, dressing in costumes, or coming from a swim. The Selected Gifts (1974–2015) documents a few of the presents Horn has received from friends and family over the years. There are photographs of a pair of leather gloves, a handmade figurine of an olive tree, and two copies of Djuna Barnes’s The Book of Repulsive Women (1915). Taken as a whole, the collection offers a self-portrait of Horn as she is seen by those close to her.
Sculptures
In the 1980s and early 1990s Horn created her installation series Pair Objects, for which she placed two identical sculptures in two different neighboring locations, encouraging the viewer to perceive the object twice and process the likenesses and differences.
Similar to Pair Objects is Horn’s series of solid-glass sculptures, which she began casting in the 1990s. Each piece features two casts resembling each other in form but differing in color. Opposites of White (2006–07), for example, features two wide cylinders recalling industrial water tanks, one clear and the other black. The sides of each piece retain the rough texture of the mold, but the tops are fire-polished, giving them a reflective quality that resembles still water.
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Artist’s books and exhibitions
Horn’s art practice also included the creation of artist’s books, a type of art that takes the form of a book or draws on the concept of a book. Her most well-known artist’s books are those in the ongoing series, To Place, which explores her relationship with Iceland through text and reproductions of drawings, watercolors, and photographs. The first volume, Bluff Life, was printed in a limited edition in 1990. She has also created artist books from several of her photographic series and exhibitions. Horn has been the subject of many solo exhibitions, and her work was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial in 1991 and 2004, in the Venice Biennale in 1980, 1984, 1986, 1997, and 2003, and at Tate Modern in 2009–10. The Whitney co-organized a large traveling retrospective of Horn’s work, “Roni Horn aka Roni Horn” (2009–10).