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Roni Horn's midcareer survey at the Tate Modern takes a while to warm up to, but give it some time and the shimmering, meditative work will begin to invite you in. The 54-year-old New York artist’s first solo show in Britain, the exhibition encompasses the full range of her diverse career—from refulgent glass sculptures to drawings, photography, and text-based pieces—and introduces viewers to her recurring themes of identity, androgyny, and water.
As an artist whose sculptures often recall such Minimalist forebears as John McCracken, Horn has long explored the sympathetic relationship between water and glass, once filling a gallery with glass tubes that contained water from melted glaciers. Here, with the Thames visible from the Tate’s windows, her translucent sculptures of vividly colored cast glass also seem poised on the verge of melting. This reference to water, repeated again in her photographic series Pi (which recalls the work of Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra as well as in a room dedicated to Iceland (pun intended), provides a beautiful meditation on depth and surface, known and unknown.
Communication, or lack thereof, is another prevailing theme in Horn’s work. An ant farm sandwiched between glass, an aspherical solid steel ball, a pair of copper cones—these pieces force the viewer to interact with their sullen silence. Other work, however, quote from poetry or recall the verbal play of Lawrence Weiner and Jenny Holzer, putting that silence into further relief. Horn once said, “My relationship to my work is extremely verbal, extremely language-based. I am probably more language-based than I am visual.” But as shown by a set of golden, chocolate-wrapper-like foil mats—an homage to her late friend Felix Gonzalez-Torres—that come alive when struck by light from the window, her works have the ability to quietly dazzle when helped by their setting.
Roni Horn aka Roni Horn
25 February - 25 May 2009
Tate Modern, Southbank
London SE1 9TG
t. +44 20 7887 8888
e. visiting.modern@tate.org.uk
w. http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/
More about Roni Horn:
View artist profile [Via ArtWeLove]
"Let yourself go with the Roni Horn flow," a review by Rachel Campbell-Johnston [Via Times Online]
"Torrid, frosty and brutal," a review by Adrian Searle [Via The Guardian]
"Enigma variations: The curious world of Roni Horn" a review by Jeanette Winterson [Via the Independent]
Selected pics from the show:
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