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RONI
HORN
18
January - 30 March 2008
CAC
Málaga, Málaga City Council’s
Centre for Contemporary Art, presents the first
solo exhibition in Spain by Roni Horn, one of
the most influential American artists on the international
art scene. The exhibition may be visited until
30 March and is made up of photographs, installations
and two artists’ books.
Málaga’s Contemporary Art Centre
opens its doors to the most representative works
produced over the last decade by the incomparable
Roni Horn. In this, the first solo exhibition
to be presented by the artist in Spain, the guiding
thread is the portrait, a medium she has developed
to its full potential in recent years.
In the words of the Director of CAC Málaga,
Fernando Francés, Roni Horn creates an
aesthetic in her work that is decidedly contradictory,
bringing out strange sensations and a surprising
attraction in the viewer. This is not conventional
minimalist art; far from the usual distanced approach,
Roni Horn’s work has much greater warmth
because it has an immediate effect on our emotions,
with the artist taking a direct stand on the issues
that concern her, such as femininity, human roles,
and nature and its relationship to the human being.
She is fascinated by individuality, the particular
rather than the general, the real, identifiable
woman above the others. This apparently straightforward,
even simple image masks a really complex process
of observation and documentation of human experiences
and memories.
Through her painstaking, meticulous work this
American artist captures the tiniest, most imperceptible
changes in reality, thereby highlighting the importance
of observation and perception.
All of the works on display in the exhibition
are now unquestioned masterpieces of the artist,
and one of the most famous and recognised is Doubt
by Water. The piece consists of twelve images
produced as six, double-sided photographs mounted
on aluminium stands. Their contents include ice,
a portrait of a young person and the heads of
several stuffed birds which are so incredibly
lifelike that spectators can easily become confused
as to the nature of what they are seeing. As much
in this work as in the others, water is an element
to which the artist constantly returns. As she
herself says, “Aside from the physical,
sensual reality of water, the thing that I love
is its paradoxical nature[…] I never intended
to have water in everything I do, but I almost
feel that I rediscover it again and again”.
Besides viewing the photographs and installations,
visitors to the exhibition at CAC Málaga
will be able to consult two of her latest publications.
The titles of these works are Index Cixous, inspired
by the author Hélène Cixous, and
Weather Reports You, which may be defined as a
collective portrait of Iceland, a land she knows
to perfection.
Roni Horn, one of the most renowned American artists
of her time, has produced an extensive oeuvre
in a variety of mediums including sculpture, photography,
drawing, essays and artists’ books. Her
work falls within the minimalist current, albeit
a warm minimalism abounding in personal and poetic
references. Her work represents a connecting link
between humanity and nature. Since 1975 Horn has
lived her life between New York and Iceland, a
country with which she maintains close contact
and whose scenery and isolation from the rest
of the world have been a decisive influence on
evolution of her work.
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