RONI HORN

Drawing has been integral to Horn’s oeuvre for nearly 40 years. Describing it as her ‘primary activity,’ sheexpands the language of mark-making by constructing, deconstructing and then reconstructing imagesand texts. A meditation on meaning, Horn’s unique process of taking things apart and putting themback together anew tests the limits of draftsmanship by exploring its sculptural potential. For her latestseries, titled ‘Slarips’ (the word ‘spirals’ written in reverse), Horn began by making watercolour spirals inan array of hues. She then cut up the painted images and collaged them together into new tessellatedcompositions. Each is titled with a deliberate misspelling of the word ‘spirals,’ signaling a profounddeparture from the work’s original source material.

Horn is an avid reader, and as much a writer as she is a visual artist. Words naturally permeate herpractice. In this exhibition, her use of language pertains to the works’ titles, which act as entrance ratherthan explanation. Horn’s wordplay also figures in the sculptures on view: the titles of the six luminouscast-glass forms feature quotes from novels, films and radio broadcasts. These shallow tapered circularforms––a new shape in Horn’s ongoing glass works––are infused with a singular color drawn from apalette of whites, blacks and blues. As daylight pours in from the skylights, moving across the gallery andchanging temperature over the course of the day, the saturation and transparency of the colours likewiseshift. The subtle effects of varying light, combined with viewers’ movements in the room, activate theseworks, which defy any fixed reading.

The artist began making cast-glass sculptures in the mid-1990s, pouring colored molten glass intomolds that would then gradually anneal over the course of several months. Horn spent years developinga specific technical process that furnishes her finished works with a nearly alchemical quality: they appearsimultaneously fluid and solid. Visually ambiguous, their opaque, roughly textured sides bear impressionsof the molds in which they were cast, while their glossy, fire-polished tops recall the crystal-clear surfaceof an undisturbed pool of water. Water, often considered a universal symbol for change, is a constanttheme for Horn, once 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.... Ratherthan an object, water becomes a metaphor for consciousness—of time, of physicality, of the humancondition.’

Press release courtesy Hauser & Wirth