Roni Horn

Roni Horn – Iceland’s raw landscape as inspiration and artistic home

Roni Horn was born on 25 September 1955 in New York. The daughter of a pawnbroker from Haarlem, she spent her childhood in the city and its suburbs and studied from 1972 to 1975 at Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. More important for the artist’s development than her studies, however, was a trip to Iceland, made possible with the help of a scholarship, establishing a lifelong relationship with the Nordic island. The unique climatic conditions on Iceland greatly impressed Roni in particular; Iceland is big enough to lose oneself, and small enough to find oneself, the artist remarked. In Iceland, which she visited time and again in the course of her career, Roni Horn also found in abundance the two elements that shaped much of her art: water and weather. The often abrupt shift between storm and sunshine and the unease associated with this disturbance embodies a large part of the artist’s fascination for Iceland – and is addressed in her art. 

The play with the change of identity

Roni Horn has published several photo books; her ongoing series To Place resonated greatly and is named in the same breath as the epochal works of important photo artists such as Ed Ruscha and Bernd and Hilla Becher. Her installations achieved similar significance: her first photo installation You Are The Weather was made up of 100 photographs of a woman called Margret posing in front of different geothermic pools. Roni Horn set up the installation You Are The Weather for the office of the German Weather Service in Munich, and in Iceland she designed a library made of water at the highest place in the city of Stykkisholmur. Roni understands identity as something continuously in change and wishes to sound out this constant flux with her art. With this in mind, she repeatedly works with similar, but not identical pictorial motifs, juxtaposing them and blurring the boundaries. Precisely for this reason, she prefers the materials of water and glass, as they are already subject to permanent change according to their constitution. 

Worldwide exhibition success and numerous awards

Roni Horn has held solo exhibitions in New York, London, Paris and Basel; and in doing so, she has always placed great value on the correct placement of her art objects in the exhibition spaces. The artist never tires of emphasizing that the positioning and the relationship to the immediate environment are essential for the understanding of her art and exert a great influence on the viewer’s experience. In 1992, she took part in Jean Hoet’s Documenta IX in Kassel, and was a guest at the Venice Biennale in 1997. Roni Horn has received prizes and awards for her work including the Alpert Award and the Joan Miró Prize. Roni Horn lives and works alternately in her native city of New York and in Reykjavik, Iceland.