The Pola Museum of Art is pleased to present a solo exhibition of the work of Roni Horn, one of the most

prominent American artists working today. This will be her first solo exhibition at a museum in Japan.

Many of Horn’s works are inextricably linked to nature, with subjects including the waters of the River

Thames, hot springs in Iceland, and glass sculptures whose surfaces evoke liquid reflectivity. Horn

employs a wide range of media, including photography, sculpture, drawing and books, and often

presents her work in paired or sequenced form. The recurrence of motifs across widely varied media is

reminiscent of the nature of water, which changes form and appearance depending on relationships

with its environment and surroundings. Water and rivers themselves, which represent the human spirit

and transience in East Asian philosophy, frequently appear within Horn’s oeuvre, as the title of this

exhibition suggests.

The exhibition will be an in-depth survey of the artist’s practice spanning over 40 years, from the 1980s

to the present, exploring a multifaceted body of work including the glass sculptures that are among her

most prominent works of recent years. Horn’s art harnesses a sense of ambiguity in an era in which

value systems and ideas about the nature of truth change rapidly. The artist casts an unwavering gaze,

ceaseless as a river’s flow, upon the essence of things – this exhibitions invites viewers to do the same,

offering inspiration and time for reflection.

Glass Sculptures

The glass sculptures are among Roni Horn’s most prominent works of recent years. The unresolved nature of glass, as a substance that from the perspective of physics is neither solid nor liquid, echoes the ambiguous and open-ended nature of the artist’s work. Each of these pieces, whose surfaces can evoke the appearance of water, is actually a block of glass weighing hundreds of kilogram that is slowly annealed in molds over great lengths of time. A total of nine glass sculptures will be installed in an expansive gallery with large windows and in the forest outside the museum, gently reflecting their surroundings and diffusing light while simultaneously containing contradictory qualities––static and dynamic, gentle and rough, surface layer andabyssal depth, transparency and massive volume.

Or 6

Roni Horn describes drawing as her most primary activity, comparing it to “being like breathing.” It is the only practice she has pursued continually from 1982 to the present. The content of the drawings ranges from abstract lines and shapes to text fragments quoted from a variety of sources, including poems and plays, all inextricably linked both to movements of her hands and to personal thoughts and memories. The seven monumentally sized drawings occupying one large gallery in this exhibition are approximately three meters in height. Close examination of the drawings will reveal the handwritten symbols, marks, and incisions in the paper, indicating that the works have been cut into pieces and then recombined using a delicate manual process.

You are the Weather, Part 2

Since she received a Petri camera from her father as a teenager, photography has been an interest for Roni Horn. This extensive series, comprising 100 portraits of a woman staring straight out at the viewer from every wall of the gallery, were taken at Icelandic hot springs over a six-week period and document subtle shifts in her facial expression. In everyday life, we often describe people’s states of being or experiences using weather terms – someone can “have a sunny nature” or be “walking on air,” or less happily, their face may “cloud over” when it “rains on their parade.” As we survey the 100 facial expressions of a single woman, no two alike, always changing in an alternatively placid or intense way like the weather, we find that constant change lurks even within that which is ostensibly the same.

Bouquet of Emily

Language and literature are crucial elements that have shaped Roni Horn as an artist, and many quotations from texts appear in her works. She draws on a truly diverse wealth of sources, including Paul Valéry, Henry David Thoreau, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Flannery O’Connor and Edgar Allan Poe, but the renowned American poet Emily Dickinson is of particular importance to the artist. Bouquet of Emily is a group of six aluminum bars featuring selected fragments of text from letters Dickinson sent. The phrases are only legible when viewed than the front – from other angles, the letters of the alphabet are deconstructed into pure forms.