INFERNO

Roni Horn – A Rat Surrendered Here – July 1 – October 24, 2021 – Château La Coste, Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, France

Galleria Raffaella Cortese announces the opening of Roni Horn’s solo show A Rat Surrendered Here at Château La Coste, near Aix-en-Provence, on view from July 1 through October 24. The title of the exhibition is taken from a poem by Emily Dickinson, which Horn incorporated in an aluminum sculpture from her Key and Cue series (1994-1995).
The show features sculpture, photography, and drawing that relate to the theme of death, including the 1999 photographic installation Still Water (The River Thames, for Example). Each of the 15 photographs that comprise this work depict the surface of the river Thames, showing the water’s varying colors and textures. Close inspection reveals that the photograph is annotated with numbers which correspond to the footnotes printed at the bottom of each plate.

Roni Horn was born in 1955 New York. She lives and works in New York. Horn’s oeuvre, which spans almost four decades, explores the mutable nature of art through sculptures, works on paper, photography, and books. 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. 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.

Horn has had one-person exhibitions at the Drawing Institute at the Menil Collection (2019); the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2017); Glenstone, Potomac (2017); Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland (2016); the Fundacio Joan Miro, Barcelona (2014); the FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2011); the Center of Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw (2010); Whitney Museum of American Art (2009); Tate Modern, London and Collection Lambert, Avignon (2008); Museion, Bolzano (2005); Art Institute of Chicago (2004); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2003); Dia Center for the Arts, New York, and Museu Serralves, Porto (2001); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Kunsthalle Basel (1995); Rencontres d’Arle s festival, France (2009); and Tate Modern, London (2009). Group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial (1991, 2004); Documenta (1992); and Venice Biennale (1997), among others.

In 2004 she was a visiting critic at Columbia University. In November 2009, the Whitney Museum of American Art opened a survey show of Horn’s work. Titled Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, the show travelled to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (2010), the Tate Modern, London (25 February – 25 May 2009), and the Collection Lambert in Avignon (21 June – 4 October 2009).

image: Roni Horn – Still Water (The River Thames, for Example), 1999 (detail).