Roni Horn’s subtle but commanding art demands a focused eye to be seen for what it is. The same can be said for Horn herself. With the exception of her eyes, which are the brilliant blue of a far-off sea, she is almost devoid of color. Her salt-and-pepper hair is shorn so short as to blend with her pale face. Her mannish black shirt and jeans add to the effect, further deflecting snap judgments. A quick glance at Horn on the street or in a restaurant would yield few conclusive clues to her gender, so complete is her androgyny. She must be looked at.
Her art, too, is unconstrained by convention; it’s always a notch off-kilter. Rooted in conceptualism but deeply intuitive, with influences as varied as Iceland’s primeval terrain and Flannery O’Connor’s Southern Gothic short stories, her oeuvre spans mediums from photography and books to drawing and sculpture. There is, for example, Asphere (1988), balls made of stainless steel or copper with dimensions just a bit tweaked—they’re not quite spheres. Then consider Her, Her, Her & Her (2002–03), a collage of black and white photographs shot inside a women’s locker room, mostly of tile and doors but with voyeuristic glimpses of women, and Things That Happen Again: For Two Rooms (1986), two copper cylinders placed in two separate spaces. They seem to be identical, but since the viewer can’t see them simultaneously, who’s to say? “I don’t necessarily think of myself as a visual artist primarily,” says Horn, 54. “A lot of my work is really very conceptual, and it has very little visual aspect to it, the sculpture especially. That work is more powerfully about experience and presence than it is about a powerful visual experience.”
Unlike the artists who made themselves into brand names over the past two decades, Horn has steered clear of a signature style. She avoids instant, easy identification while cleaving to themes of identity and nature. “Her work requires silence,” says Vicente Todolí, director of the Tate Modern in London, where Horn’s midcareer retrospective, opening November 6 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, originated. “It makes you aware of your condition as an individual and confronting the world. And that is not easy. It can take some loneliness. On the one hand, you can feel related, involved, attached to the work, but at the same time, the lines or the threads are almost invisible.”
On a warm July afternoon, sunlight is pouring into Horn’s expansive studio in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. She has pulled her chair close to a window overlooking a courtyard and a spectacular flowering mimosa tree. Horn, drinking a glass of water, is warm and funny, self-deprecating while not feigning modesty as she talks about the retrospective and its catalog, an unusual two-volume set that encompasses her thoughts on all manner of topics, as well as the standard color plates of her greatest hits. On one cover is a matching pair of photos of Horn wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a white button-down shirt over an undershirt. She took some heat for the choice. “There wasn’t really any narcissistic element,” she says. “Nobody would know that’s me, per se. But there was some criticism about ‘You shouldn’t do that, Roni. People will think the book’s all about you.’ Yeah? Well, the book is about me. Eventually they changed their minds, I think. Regardless, I overrode those questions.”
