RONI HORN
The acclaimed New York-based artist Roni Horn, awarded the Joan Miró Prize in 2013 and known for her conceptually oriented work in diverse media, featuring a selection of sculptures and installations that interact with the historical gallery spaces and natural surroundings.
May 11 - October 27, 2024
Although varied in medium, all works derive from longstanding themes that have propelled Horn’s ongoing poetic study on the protean nature of identity, meaning and perception. An ambitious installation of solid cast glass sculptures invites visitors to witness the interplay between light and weather in the South Galleries.
At the heart of the exhibition lies ‘Untitled (“A witch is more lovely than thought in the mountain rain.”)’, a compelling collection of nine round sculptures made from solid cast glass. Horn started exploring and working on cast-glass sculptures in the mid-1990s, with a process consisting of pouring coloured molten glass into a mould, which gradually hardens over the course of several months.
Uncertainty and ambiguity permeate Horn’s work, evident in the seemingly watery surface of the cast-glass sculptures as well as in ‘Black Asphere’, a solid copper work which appears to the eye as a ball or ‘a sphere’. The term ‘asphere’ refers to the fact that it is not symmetrical in one axis. Horn has described the work as ‘a self-portrait’, linked to the artist’s experience of androgyny and resistance to binary labels.
In the Menorca exhibition, the pure gold sculpture ‘Double Mobius, v. 2’, presents two ribbons in the form of a Möbius strip, a geometrical form that appears to be two sided, but only has one side. The piece strips away the layers of cultural significance associated with gold and allows visitors to experience the actual material, in the shape of a strip denoting both intimacy and infinity.
Whereas the multi-part glass installation is titled ‘A witch is more lovely than thought in the mountain rain’ after a poem by Joan Murray, three sculptures from Horn’s ‘Key and Cue’ series feature the first lines of poems by Emily Dickinson, to whom Horn has dedicated various bodies of work.
In the series ‘Key and Cue,’ Horn uses the verses as self-contained statements across the four faces of the bar, refusing to be seen or read all at once. In these pieces, Horn renders the text as images, encouraging us to think about language as sculpture, and hence removed from its meaning.