Artist Roni Horn considers herself “off brand” in more ways than one.
“I’m not even sure I’m a visual artist,” she said recently during a visit to her large Manhattan studio, unprofitably located in a luxury apartment building in Chelsea.
These statements may sound self-deprecating coming from someone with four solo exhibitions in galleries and museums this spring, an unusual number for any artist.
But Horne, 68, an intellectually walking Conceptualist, has an innate confidence that may stem from the fact that she doesn’t feel like she fits in anywhere, personally or professionally, ever. So she just follows her ideas wherever they lead — what’s the worst that could happen?
The results he achieves seem to have few stylistic similarities. The serene, minimalist cast glass sculptures do not seem to be by the same person who created these playful text-based drawings or the suites of paired photographs. Sometimes her work reveals her hand. more often it is built to her specifications.
“So much of the art world is about branding, and Roni’s work is not that,” said Poul Erik Tojner, director of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark, the site of one of her upcoming shows.
Her big theme turns out to be the fallibility of identity itself, which may explain why Horne describes an exhibition as a “group display of myself.”
In a career spanning nearly 50 years, she has returned to the concept of doubling again and again, as in her 1997 diptych “Dead Owl,” twin photographs of a stuffed snowy owl. A solo exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and Tate Modern, which ran from 2009 to 2010, was called “Ronnie Horn aka Ronnie Horn.”
“The fluidity of identity has always been something that I’ve always associated with myself,” Horne said. “I wasn’t anything stable. I was very stable, but I wasn’t stable.”
From this complex idea comes work with reduced quality. “Her work is so distilled,” said artist Matthew Barney, a friend of Horne’s. “He sharpens it until what remains is presence. No extra baggage.”
Horn’s long-standing gallery Hauser & Wirth features her twice this season. At one of the gallery’s New York locations, in SoHo, an exhibition of her work (through June 28) includes six luminous pieces of cast glass as well as 14 works on paper made with graphite and watercolor, which she calls “cut into cubes’ because it cuts and reassembles them.
An exhibition at the gallery’s branch on the Spanish island of Menorca opens on May 11 with a variety of installations and sculptures, including ‘Asphere’ (1988/2006), a patinated bronze sphere that is slightly tilted.
In addition, he has two important surveys of European museums. “Roni Horn: Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death” runs through August 11 at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany, while “Roni Horn: The Detour of Identity” runs from May 2 to September 1 at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. ‘Detour’ combines her work with clips from classic films.
That both museum exhibits are outside the United States doesn’t surprise Horn.
“Most of my work has not been collected here, with one exception Glenstone,” she said, referring to the art museum in Potomac, Md., founded by collectors Mitchell P. Rales and Emily Wei Rales. “I’m not a must-have artist. I was never hot.”
Horne lives in Greenwich Village and also has a home on Mount Desert Island, Maine. He loves remote places and for many years spent a lot of time working in Iceland.
Sitting in a separate room of her studio hung with works by other artists—including Matthew Barney, Philip Guston, Weegee, Ed Ruscha, Louise Bourgeois and Vija Celmins—Horn became agitated as she talked about her life and career. He kept reaching for a notebook, but never marked. If her muse happened to call, she was ready.
“I see most of my art as a solution,” he said of the circuitous routes he takes in a finished work. “Self-design and solutions.”
That day he was working on what he called a “strange design”: The letters of the word “spirals” had been rearranged over and over in it.
“It just came out of nowhere,” he said. “Even if it doesn’t make sense in the end, I thought, ‘Let’s check it out.’
Even in a time when attitudes about sexuality and gender norms are changing, the way Horn talks about herself stands out. It has long avoided most labels. Asked if she was married, she said, “Technically, yes, but I’m not part of the foundation.” (Julia Todoli, whom Horn prefers to call her partner rather than wife, is a teacher.)
Horne, who came of age in the 1970s, recalled navigating a culture that didn’t seem to have a place for her. “I got kicked out of women’s bars a lot of times because people thought I was a man,” he said, adding, “I couldn’t help being androgynous.”
Instead of choosing a subculture, “I just floated,” he said, partly because he’s not a very social person to begin with.
“She made gender an issue in her work,” said Glenstone director Emily Wei Rales, adding, “and she fought for it.” Rales, who organized a show of Horne’s work in 2017-18, observed: “She is who she is and she’s unapologetic about it.” The museum’s collection includes the cylindrical cast glass work ‘Water Double, vol. 3’ (2013-15), another double work.
Horn’s glass works have become a signature and are featured in all four of her spring shows. Made with optical glass, they can weigh up to five tons. Horne, returning to the doubling idea, said: “It has this naughty appearance as a solid, but technically it’s a supercooled liquid.”
Viewers often believe that the pieces are made of water and provoke a strong response. “They are unspeakably beautiful,” said Horn’s friend Tacita Dean, the British artist. “And I think it’s incredibly, sensual femalevery.”
Providing aesthetic pleasure is not always considered an advantage for a Conceptual artist.
“They criticize me because they’re beautiful,” Horn said. “But I think the beauty in them is a manifestation or an artifact of that idea that I’ve developed.” In other words, it is a by-product and not the essence of the work.
Horne was born in Queens and partially raised in Rockland County, New York. Her mother had various jobs and her father was a pawnbroker. His preoccupation with jewelry helped inspire an important early work, “Golden Field” (1980/1994), a sculpture made of thin sheets like gold leaf. “Maybe I got the pawnbroker’s daughter thing out of my system with that,” he said.
Horn’s father gave her a camera from his pawn shop, and her parents “put value” on things like taking her to the Museum of Modern Art.
Seeing the Northern Lights as a child also made an impression, leading her to a series of nature-themed works such as You Are the Weather (1994-96): 100 photographs of a woman sitting in hot springs in Iceland, with a slightly different expression in each image. A series of related photographs, “Untitled (Weather)” (2010-11), are in the Louisiana Museum exhibit.
“The works use the weather as a barometer of feeling,” said Donna De Salvo, a former chief curator at the Whitney who helped curate Horn’s solo show there.
“He has different weapons, and repetition is one of them,” Tojner of the Louisiana Museum said of Horn’s penchant for repetition. At the exhibition in Denmark, visitors will find “Portrait of an Image (with Isabelle Upper)” (2005-06) — 50 images of the French actress stacked in rows.
When Horn was pursuing her degree at the Rhode Island School of Design, her thesis project, titled “Ant Farm,” used real ants, which she said was probably the first sign of her fearlessness in trying new materials.
“The ants were really about social culture,” Horne said. “The ants created, in effect, a blueprint on the earth.” He added, “Design, for me, is the core activity.”
For her MFA at Yale, Horn chose sculpture as a focus, in part because it meant she wouldn’t be tied to one particular material, keeping her options open as always.
She had her first solo exhibition in 1980 at Kunstraum, a non-profit space in Munich. Later that year she had a show at the Institute of Art and Urban Resources (the predecessor to MoMA PS1), where she exhibited her first double work, ‘Pair Object I’ (1980), made of two copper rods.
He has often returned to installations leaning bars against a wall, often covered with text, as in When Dickinson Shut Her Eyes: No. 859 A DOUBT IF IT BE US’ (1993/2007). This work, from her series highlighting the poet, is included in the Cologne show.
Over the years, Horn has become particular about how she installs her art. Just because she’s mined ambiguity in her work doesn’t mean she lacks strong opinions. “Anyone who works with me knows I’m the curator,” she said.
Rales recalled that for Glenstone’s 2017 exhibition, Horn made a detailed drawing of the exact measurements of the space.
“When she got here, she said, ‘This ceiling height needs to be changed and this wall needs to go here,'” said Rales, who became a close friend of Horn’s, as did her husband. “She likes control, but I could also sense that she was right.”
De Salvo said that Horn’s outward harshness is at odds with the work itself: “Roni imbues it all with tenderness and vulnerability. She’s lying down enough.”
But the form of that expression may well change from piece to piece, epitomized by the work that gives Louisiana its name, a text-based gouache titled “The Detour of Identity” (1984-85).
Horne acknowledged that for casual viewers, it “doesn’t maintain an entry point into the play” – visually speaking – “and that’s why I’m losing my audience”.
The prospect of losing viewers might make some artists zig or zag, but Horne is already in the bypass business.
“Even if something is popular,” he said, “I still move on to something else.”