Roni Horn

Despite its originality, the graphic work of Roni Horn remains little known in France. From 1 October 2003 to 5 January 2004 the Centre Pompidou's Musée National d'Art Moderne is presenting the first-ever French exhibition of her drawings in the Galerie d’art graphique on Level 4. This selection of 23 remarkable works is taken from series dating from 1995-2003. Born in New York in 1955,Roni Horn –known mainly for her sculpture and photography –has been producing drawings for over twenty years,but in a way that takes the concept beyond that of mere graphics.Drawing,for her,is a combination of writing,sculpture and photographic installations,the dominant characteristic being a dialectical interaction between work and viewer.After studying at the Rhode Island School of Design (1972-75),Roni Horn went on to Yale (1976-78).Although she began showing in France in 1987,her work only really began to find a public in 1999 –at the CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art in Bordeaux and the City of Paris Museum of Modern Art –and in 2002 at the Yvon Lambert Gallery. What she calls her "pigment drawings"involve direct application of pigment to paper,with a touch of turpentine.In the course of a process that can take several months,the powder is fixed to the paper with progressive brushings of varnish.There follows a meticulous exercise in recomposition,in which the paper is cut either into regular strips or complex geometrical shapes;these are then joined edge to edge with scraps of paper of matching thicknesses and colours,giving a result closer to assemblage than to collage.Treating her drawings as spatial compositions,Horn brings to bear a sculptor's concern with the occupation of space and the relationships between the various elements,and a sculptural precision in assigning these elements their place within the frame defined by the edges of the sheet. During the 1980s she used paper as a bridge to exploration of fresh possibilities: the drawings from this period are repetitions of coloured shapes.In the 1990s the sheet increased in size;the lines created by the assembled pieces of paper began to loom larger and were given clearer definition via fine pencil strokes and simple,repeated words that marked the points of confluence between the different papers used. Pressetext

Roni Horn
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Ort: Galerie d´Art Graphique, Level 4