Roni Horn

Roni Horn
Roni Horn at Barcelona's Fundació Joan Miró, where she was given the Joan Miró Award
Born	September 25, 1955 New York City
Nationality	American
Education	Rhode Island School of Design, Yale University
Known for	Visual arts
Awards	Joan Miró Award 2013 by Fundació Miró

Roni Horn (born September 25, 1955) is an American visual artist and writer. Horn's oeuvre, which spans almost four decades, encompasses sculpture, drawing, photography, language, and site-specific installation. The granddaughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, she was born in New York and lives and works in New York.

Horn quit high school a year early at 16 and enrolled in the Rhode Island School of Design. She received an MFA in sculpture from Yale University. Since 1975 Horn has traveled often to Iceland, whose landscape and isolation have strongly influenced her practice.

Horn explores the mutable nature of art and identity through sculptures, works on paper, photography, and books. She describes drawing as the key activity in all her work because drawing is about composing relationships. Horn’s drawings concentrate on the materiality of the objects depicted. She also uses words as the basis for drawings and other works. Horn crafts complex relationships between the viewer and her work by installing a single piece on opposing walls, in adjoining rooms, or throughout a series of buildings. She subverts the notion of ‘identical experience’, insisting that one’s sense of self is marked by a place in the here-and-there, and by time in the now-and-then. She describes her artworks as site-dependent, expanding upon the idea of site-specificity associated with Minimalism. Horn’s work also embodies the cyclical relationship between humankind and nature—a mirror-like relationship in which we attempt to remake nature in our own image.

For the past 30 years, the work of Roni Horn has been intimately involved with the singular geography, geology, climate and culture of Iceland. Since her first encounter with the island as a young arts graduate visiting on a fellowship from Yale, Horn has returned to Iceland frequently over the years. Iceland has been muse and medium to Roni Horn.

In an interview, Horn was quoted as saying that "the entrance to all my work... which is extremely important to me" is the ongoing series of books entitled To Place (1990-) concerning Iceland. The books consider identity, site, and nature through photographs of landscapes, ice, rocks, swirling water, and people; most of the images are accompanied by descriptive, classificatory, or literary texts. In describing her attraction to the landscape, Horn states:

The drama comes from its youth. The landscape is unique in that the geology is very young. It’s like a labyrinth in the definitive sense. It’s big enough to get lost in, but small enough to find yourself. There is little erosion and, as a result, unexpected symmetries exist in unexpected places. America has everything Iceland has, but it’s ten thousand, twenty thousand, one hundred thousand years older... Growing up in a very “old” landscape—New York City—its origins are secreted from the present. I mean that the geological aspect of the landscape in New York City can only be experienced theoretically at this point. In Iceland, you understand empirically exactly what this place is: its what and how. That accessibility effects the nature of one’s experience, the experience of the world. Any place you’re going to stand in, in any given moment, is a complement to the rest of the world, historically and empirically. What you can see in that moment, what you can touch in that moment, is confluent with everything else.