Roni Horn

Roni Horn grew up in New York, where her father ran a pawnshop in Harlem, and studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University. In 1975 Horn visited Iceland for the first time. Since then the unique, rugged landscape of this country and its extremely changeable weather have been an endless source of inspiration to her. Opting for a range of media, she produces many drawings, photographs and books of photographs in addition to sculptures and installations.

In recent years the Whitney Museum in New York, Tate Modern in London and Paris’s Centre Pompidou have held solo exhibitions of Roni Horn’s work. With this exhibition at De Pont, the accent lies with work from the past ten years: her monumental sculptures of glass, photographic works and recent series of drawings. Through the addition of drawings and photographs from the 1980s and 90s, the visitor nonetheless has a fairly broad view of her oeuvre.

For those who visit De Pont frequently, another recent work titled Water Teller (2014) will probably be a reminder of Horn’s iconic photo series You are the Weather, first shown here in 1998 and part of the collection since then. In that series of a hundred portraits, the bathing young blond woman looks at the viewer as her facial expression shows only minimal changes with each image. For this series Horn travelled around Iceland with Margrét Haraldsdóttir Blöndal for six weeks in 1994, visiting the hot springs that stand out so strangely in their desolate surroundings. The changes of expression in Blöndal’s face are brought about by weather conditions, by sun shining in her eyes or an icecold wind. The title of the work suggests that the viewer can act as the weather here. Water Teller, now being shown for the first time, consists of two parts in which fashion photographer Jürgen Teller is depicted twice in each of them. None of the photographs are straightforward portraits: having minimal distinctions, these are all depictions of Teller’s face reflected in water. We automatically think of the tale about the beautiful Narcissus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the son of a nymph who falls in love with his own reflection in water. Ultimately, this love would be his demise. Narcissus could not tell the difference between his own body and its reflection in water. The text on a gouache by Horn from 2010, When You See Your Reflection in Water Do You Recognize the Water in You, opens up a new perspective on the classical Narcissus myth. Man and nature are inextricably bound to each other. Not only weather, but also nature and landscape influence man’s changing identity.

The matter of her own identity continues to be a leitmotif throughout Horn’s body of work. The photographic series a.k.a. (2008-2009), hung on the diagonally placed wall across from the wool-storage rooms, shows fifteen pairs of portraits from every phase of Horn’s life. Sometimes the two photographs are nearly identical, and differences are difficult to detect. With other works the difference in age is quite obvious. A beautiful and revealing combination shows the portrait of an endearing toddler next to an Icelandic lava-rock landscape covered with grey-green moss, where Horn’s face appears with a huge mane of reddish hair. Man and nature become an almost fluid entity. This series of photographs candidly shows how the artist (also known as Roni Horn) developed into the androgynous personality that she is today and actually, in retrospect, always has been. With her short grey hair, clean-cut glasses, white shirt and t-shirt, she has no distinctly masculine or feminine appearance. The attire is practical and elegant for both men and women. She recently described it herself as follows: ‘Adrogyny isn’t two things, it’s everything. It’s synthesis; not this and that. It’s a state of integration.’

Two other series of portrait photographs also keep us ab- sorbed in observation. Both are distributed throughout two different spaces and thereby initially cause us to think, once again, that we’re looking at the same photographs. Portrait of an Image (with Isabelle Huppert) (2005) comprises a hundred photographs of this French actress as she re-portrays her roles played in film. The differences in the expression of her scarcely made-up, ‘naked’ face are subtle, yet the variations seem to be endless. Horn produced another series titled This is Me, This is You (2000) with her niece, who bears a striking resemblance to herself as a child. Like every young girl she plays out various roles in search of her identity. While acting as the provocative temptress at one moment, she later crawls into her shell and becomes a shy teenager. ‘Becomes herself’ one might be inclined to say, though no evidence of this can be found. The very notion of identity, one could in fact conclude, is as fluid as water.

The last room of the exhibition is devoted solely to Horn’s recent glass sculptures. After the narrowing space and the intimate wool-storage rooms, the visitor arrives in an open and light space where an ensemble of ten cylindrical sculptures in blue, green, light-brown and white glass provides a captivating final chord. The geometric form and sophisticated placement are vaguely reminiscent of Horn’s early work, Pair Field, and of Minimal Art. But what do we actually see? In the cylinders of glass, the surface is reflective like water at a spring; and the content seems fluid but consists of solid glass. Although the sculptures have no titles, Horn has linked them to very diverse fragments of text. Such as: ‘I deeply perceive that infinity of matter is no dream.’ As incongruous as they may seem, these fragments do play along, mentally, with what one sees. They give way to unexpected perspectives or give rise to questions, and because of this a richly varied stream of thoughts and images is set in motion. It’s an almost endless one, and to each of us it will always be different.