Pictured: View of Roni Horn's exhibition, 2017, at Hauser & Wirth, New York. Photo Ron Amstutz.
Roni Horn presents four new bodies of work: two series of works on paper, photographs of gifts that she has received since 1974, and an arrangement of her glass sculptures. In each grouping, slivers of information come together in larger narratives, revealing the seriality implicit in Horn’s seemingly complete forms. In “The Selected Gifts (1974–2015),” Horn organizes objects ranging from Djuna Barnes’s The Book of Repulsive Women to a completed puzzle of undulating water—each photographed against a stark white background—into a self-portrait as the recipient of these gifts. Hanging on walls dusted with purple pigment are two series of Horn’s drawings, comprising written words and other marks that are then cut up and reassembled. Literary phrases and everyday speech flicker in the visual static of these collages. Written on one of the drawings are the phrases CHOMPING AT THE BIT and THE DOGS OF WAR, one a colloquialism, the other a quote from Shakespeare. In the last gallery, Horn has composed a viscerally compelling installation of translucent cylindrical sculptures, dispersed across a softly lit room. They appear to hold water, but upon closer inspection you’ll find that it is merely the surface catching reflections of the windows. These vessels carry not water but light. —Emma Faith Hill
Pictured: View of Roni Horn’s exhibition, 2017, at Hauser & Wirth, New York. Photo Ron Amstutz.