Roni Horn

Roni Horn (born September 24, 1955, New York, New York, U.S.) American conceptual sculptor, installation artist, draftsman, and photographer well known for her Iceland-based body of work.

Horn left high school at age 16 and enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design (B.F.A., 1975). She went on to study sculpture and drawing and graduated in 1978 with an M.F.A. from Yale University’s School of Art. In the 1980s and early 1990s Horn created her installation series Pair Objects, for which she placed two identical sculptures in two different neighbouring locations, encouraging the viewer to perceive the object twice and process the likenesses and differences.

Beginning in 1975, Horn traveled often to Iceland, taking in the mutability of its weather and the isolated landscape that would influence and be the setting for much of her work. One example is Horn’s well-known You Are the Weather (1994–95) series. It consists of 100 close-up photographs of a woman’s face, documenting the subtle changes in the subject’s appearance as she reacts to different types of weather. Another Iceland-based work (located in a former library in the small town of Stykkishólmur) is Library of Water (2003–07), an installation of 24 glass columns containing water, each one sourced from a unique glacier. The floor of the installation is covered with weather-related words in both Icelandic and English.

Like Library of Water, many of Horn’s other works integrate text. Notable examples include Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) (1999), in which images of the River Thames include numbers related to footnotes that provide a context and the artist’s insight, and the Key and Cue series (1990s), which features aluminum columns printed with lines of poetry by Emily Dickinson, a poet Horn claimed as an important influence.

Horn has been the subject of many solo exhibitions, and her work was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial in 1991 and 2004, in the Venice Biennale in 1980, 1984, 1986, 1997, and 2003, and at Tate Modern in 2009–10. The Whitney co-organized a large traveling retrospective of Horn’s work, “Roni Horn aka Roni Horn” (2009–10).