Background

Roni Horn was born in on September 25, 1955, in New York City, New York, United States. Her father worked as a pawnbroker in the Harlem neighbourhood of New York City.

Education

Roni Horn studied at the Rhode Island School of Design graduating in 1975 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.

Then, she pursued her artistic training at the Yale University. She obtained her Master of Fine Arts in sculpture in 1978. The same year, the young artist received the Alice Kimball Traveling Fellowship which allowed her to visit Iceland. The nature of the island had a huge impact on her further artworks.

Career

Roni Horn started her career in 1978 from a teacher’s post at the Colgate University in Hamilton, New York City where she had taught till 1981.

As to her artistic career, it can be counted from her first solo exhibition at the Kunstraum München in 1980 in Munich, Germany where she presented her early artworks including the sculptures and installations made of solid-coloured glass. The debut was followed by multiple expositions around the United States.

During this time, she also worked on her sculpture series called Pair Objects which represented the geometric forms from metal. At the end of the decade, in 1989, Roni Horn took part at the Galerie Annemarie Verna, in Zurich, Switzerland. Since then, Horn’s career accelerated and she received the first recognition both from the audience and critics.

The artist’s passion for Iceland was reflected in the series of the book titled ‘To Place’ which Horn started in 1990. The series consists of the eight books with drawings and photos which document the incredible geology of Iceland and its peculiarities.

Despite the writing activity, Roni Horn has worked on photo series, sculptures and installations during the decade. Among the examples of such series were her cast-glass sculptures and text-oriented compositions. The latter, made from aluminium, featured the quotes in the plastic of Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens and other authors. The installations of the period include the permanent ‘You Are the Weather – Munich’ (1996) produced for German Meteorological Office in Munich, Germany, ‘You in You’ (1997) for Basel’s east train station or ‘Some Thames’ (2000) for the University of Akureyri in Iceland.

The artist also took part at many group and solo exhibitions like Whitney Biennial of 1991, Documenta of 1992, Venice Biennale (1997), solo shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City and Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland, both in 1995 and in many other expositions in France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Iceland and Sweden.

In 2004, Horn became a visiting critic at Columbia University in New York City. The same year she produced the installation Rings of Lispector placed at the Hauser & Wirth art gallery in London.

Three years later, she received an international commission to produce an installation for the town of Stykkishólmur, Iceland. The finished artwork for which the artist had used water from Icelandic glaciers was baptized Vatnasafn (Library of Water).

The significant solo and group exhibitions of the new decade include the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, France (2003), Art Institute of Chicago and Whitney Biennial (2004), the exhibition of Joan Miró Foundation (2014) in Barcelona, Spain, the Rat Hole Gallery in Tokyo, Japan (2017) and one of the recent shows at the Kukje Gallery in Seoul, Korea (2018).

The huge retrospective of the artist’s artworks called "Roni Horn aka Roni Horn" was held in 2009 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The exposition travelled to the United Kingdom and France.

Nowadays, Roni Horn lives and works in New York City, and in Reykjavik.

Achievements

• Roni Horn is an accomplished multidisciplinary artist whose artistic talent is recognized all over the world.
  
  From the beginning of her artistic journey, Horn has received a lot of grants and fellowships, including the Artist's Fellowship from the National Endowment Art and Guggenheim Fellowship.
  
  Roni Horn became one of the personages of the PBS' Art:21 TV program.
  
  Her book series ‘To Place’ was named some of the most notable photo volumes in history.
  
  Roni Horn’s artworks are nowadays preserved in many prestigious art galleries and museums like the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York City, the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland and Tate Modern in London among others.

Works

More photos

• book

  • To Place: Bluff Life 1990
  • To Place: Folds 1991
  • To Place: Lava 1992
  • To Place: Pooling Waters 1994
  • Inner Geography 1994
  • To Place: Verne's Journey 1997
  • To Place: Haraldsdóttir 1996

• installation

  • When Dickinson Shut Her Eyes No.689

• painting

  • Were 12

  • Water, Selected

• photo

  • Untitled (from the series Still Water)

  • Untitled (from the series Still Water)

  • Untitled (from the series Still Water)

  • Untitled (from the series Still Water)

  • Untitled (from the series Still Water)

  • Untitled (from the series Still Water)

  • Untitled (from the series Still Water)

  • Untitled (from the series Still Water)

  • Untitled (from the series Still Water)

  • Untitled (from the series Still Water)

  • Untitled (from the series Still Water)

  • Untitled (from the series Still Water)

  • Untitled (from the series Still Water)

  • Untitled (from the series Still Water)

  • Untitled (from the series Still Water)

• sculpture

  • Untitled

  • Black Asphere 9

  • Key and Cue, No. 1270: Is heaven a physician?

  • Thicket No. 2

  • Thicket No. 1

Views

Quotations: "You use metaphor to make yourself feel at home in world. You use metaphor to extinguish the unknown. The problem is the unknown is where I want to be."

"Even in its darkness, it has this picturesque element. It's something about the human condition. It's not the water itself-it's humanity's relationship to water, because that’s almost a human need, that water be a positive force."

"As is often said of photography, this photograph is a frozen moment. A frozen moment is not a moment at all."

"Usually, the subject matter of the image is not the subject of the work."

"A non-analogue image has an extremely compressed life. It starts as this and, in increasingly short time spans, becomes that."

"I understand all the work to be of a nonabstract nature regardless of the style, form, or explicit subject matter because all the work... is concerned with evoking experiences that are in themselves - and their relationship to you, the viewer - the ultimate subject and content of the work. I want to equate the experience of the work with its meaning."

"The social order of things has demanded an emphasis on the differences between gender that do not in my opinion in fact exist. I’m not going to go around putting pronouns on everything. Things are often deeply compromised by the set of assumptions you bring to the world, which is this black or white, this male or female."

Membership

• Moonhole Artists Association

  1996

Interests

• weather, geology

References

• Roni Horn (Contemporary Artists)
  2000
• Roni Horn: Wonderwater
  2004
• Roni Horn aka Roni Horn
  2009
• Roni Horn: 153 Drawings
  2013
• Roni Horn
  2017