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Drawings & Notes

15 February 2019
Roni Horn - If 2, 2011 / Pigment, varnish, colored pencil, and graphite pencil on paper - contemporary drawing, drawings, work on paper, art on paper

Roni Horn

If 2, 2011
Pigment, varnish, colored pencil, and graphite pencil on paper.
258 × 259 cm

Roni Horn: When I Breathe, I Draw, Part I
15 Februari – 5 May 2019
Menil Drawing Institute

Roni Horn

Or 7, 2014
powdered pigment, charcoal, graphite, colored pencil, and varnish on paper
278.1 x 257.8 cm

[from the pressrelease]
For over thirty years drawing has been fundamental to the practice of contemporary American artist Roni Horn (b. 1955), whose work revolves around the mutability of identity and the fragility of place, time, and language. Roni Horn: When I Breathe, I Draw presents a selected survey of the artist’s drawings from the early 1980s to her most recent work on paper. The presentation explores her unique technical approach of mark-marking with dense hues of pure pigment and her dynamic process of cutting and reassembling images and language. It includes a selection of large-scale and compositionally-complex works on paper, her series of saturated cadmium red drawings and an extensive group of cut photography, text and maps. This two-part exhibition is the first museum exhibition devoted to Horn’s drawings in the United States.

The first part of the show, on view February 15–May 5, 2019, features Horn’s encompassing drawings, some over ten feet tall. They belie their scale through the artist’s intricate passages of jotted notes. Marking time and consciousness, the personal notations maintain the intimacy of a whisper, pushing and pulling the viewer into and out of the large work. The exhibition’s title evokes the integral place of drawing within Horn’s artistic practice. It is derived from the artist’s understanding that drawing is akin to “a kind of breathing activity on a daily level.”

11 June 2018

Roni Horn

Yet 1, 2013-2017
powdered pigment, graphite, charcoal, coloured pencil and varnish on paper
312.4 x 247.7 cm

Roni Horn | Wits’ End Sampler. Recent drawings
10 June – 1 September 2018
Hauser & Wirth, Zürich

Roni Horn

Yet 7, 2017-2018
powdered pigment, graphite, charcoal, coloured pencil and varnish on paper
231.1 x 332.7 cm

[from the pressrelease]
‘The drawings are something I’ve carried on over decades, and they form a kind of breathing activity on a daily level…When I looked up the word ‘draw’ in the dictionary, I found that there were twenty-two definitions, one of which was to delineate with lines. The other twenty-one definitions are all dialectic activities, to metamorphose, to translate, to take aim…That’s where I took off from with the idea of drawing…these lines for example, are not lines, they’re edges. In other words it’s material and it’s physical reality, they’re constructions of space with a reasonable analogy to architecture.’
– Roni Horn
(From: ‘Art and Architecture’ (Chinati Symposium, Marfa TX, 1998))

For Horn, drawing is a primary activity that has been a defining area of her artistic practice since 1980, and the pigment drawings explore recurrent themes of identity, interpretation and textual play. In drawings from the Yet series, Horn has worked powdered pigment, graphite and varnish into a few first phase drawings called ‘plates’, which are then cut apart. These pieces are then rearranged and assembled, and may undergo several more cycles of splicing and stitching together before taking their ultimate form. Pencil marks, numbers and words are interspersed between shards of colour as Horn annotates the joining of plates in each drawing.

A weblog about contemporary drawing, scribbles, notes and an occasional painting or photograph. Click on images to go directly to original pictures, or on the links to learn more about the artist involved. 

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