|
|
 |
 |
|
b. 1955, New York
Born on September 24, 1955, in New York, Roni Horn grew up in the city and its suburbs. Her father was a pawnbroker in Harlem. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design before earning an M.F.A. from Yale University in 1978. Her first solo exhibition (outside the university) was held in 1980 at the Kunstraum München. Horn taught at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, for three years after completing her studies at Yale. She then returned to live in New York.
The diverse works Horn created in the 1970s included wedges of solid-colored glass set on shelves and an installation and Performance [more] centered around an ant farm. After finishing graduate school, Horn made a journey into Iceland's interior, where she traveled around by motorcycle. Her many trips to this nation have had a major impact on her oeuvre; there she attempts to capture the essence of this land of remarkable geological activity and of relative isolation from the forces of globalization.
Horn has made drawings in pigment and varnish, especially abstractions, throughout her career. In the 1980s, she worked on her sculpture series Pair Objects, in which identical geometric volumes, fabricated of metal, are displayed in two distinct spaces. Even though the sculptures themselves are the same in every way, the viewer's experience of these "platonic forms" (as Horn calls them) differs, as one's expectations change after seeing the first of the pair.
In 1990, Horn began to develop an ongoing series of artist's books named To Place, which explore her relationship to Iceland. By the end of 2001, she had produced eight volumes, along with additional, unrelated artist's books. Horn has used some of her photographs in both books and photographic installations. For example, many of the images in You Are the Weather (1994–96)—one hundred close-ups of a young woman's face, photographed as she bathed in a variety of Icelandic pools in diverse weather conditions—were published in one of the To Place volumes. The images, made during a six-week period of traveling, capture a sense of androgyny and, to Horn, eroticism.
During the 1990s, Horn also created a body of text-oriented sculptures, in which bars or blocks of aluminum are embedded with plastic letters that spell out quotes from the writings of Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and others. Horn has noted the particular kinship she feels with Dickinson, who spent time working in seclusion. Around 2000, Horn was using photography to explore the essence of water as well as questions of human identity and appearance.
The artist has created several public artworks, including You Are the Weather—Munich (1996–97), a permanent installation for the Deutscher Wetterdienst (meteorological bureau) in Munich. Yous in You (1997), a rubber-tiled walkway in Basel's east train station, mimics an unusual basalt formation of Iceland. It was designed to introduce unexpected softness under commuters' feet, as well as to bring a piece of Iceland into Switzerland.
Horn's numerous solo exhibitions include shows organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (1990), Kunstmuseum Winterthur in Winterthur, Switzerland (1993), and Kunsthalle Basel and Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hannover (1995). Her work has been exhibited in several Reykjav�k venues, as well as in group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial (1991 and 2004), Documenta (1992), Venice Biennale (1997 and 2003), Biennale of Sydney (1998), and Moving Pictures at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2002). Horn has received various awards, among them a Ford Foundation grant (1978) and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1984, 1986, and 1990) and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1990). In 2004, she was a visiting critic at Columbia University in New York, the city in which she continues to live and work.
|
|
