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Drawings & Notes

13 August 2023
Roni Horn from 'An Elusive Red Figure', 2022 Two ink jet prints on rag paper. Bleed images, floated edge-to-edge in frame, edition of 12 - contemporary drawing, collage, mixed media, drawings, art on paper

Roni Horn

from ‘An Elusive Red Figure’, 2022
Two ink jet prints on rag paper. Bleed images, floated edge-to-edge in frame, edition of 12

Roni Horn. ‘An Elusive Red Figure…’
9 June – 16 September 2023
Hauser & Wirth, Zürich

Roni Horn

from ‘An Elusive Red Figure’, 2022
Two ink jet prints on rag paper. Bleed images, floated edge-to-edge in frame, edition of 12

[from the pressrelease]
‘An Elusive Red Figure…’ is a suite of 33 paired ink jet prints, presented across the second-floor gallery space. Following on from the 2021 work ‘LOG (March 22, 2019 – May 17, 2020)’, ‘An Elusive Red Figure…’ is a collection of outtakes from ‘LOG’ as well as original drawings, including quotations, collages, photographs, casual commentaries, notes on news and weather events and original texts by Horn.

‘LOG,’ which debuted at Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street in 2021, is a large-scale installation comprised of 406 individual works on paper. The work was the result of a daily commitment to drawing undertaken by Horn over a period of fourteen months. Drawing has been a defining element of Horn’s artistic practice since the 1980s and ‘An Elusive Red Figure…’ is emblematic of Horn’s relationship with the medium, which she has described as ‘a kind of breathing activity on a daily level.’ Whilst creating the drawings on paper that would become the paired ink jet prints for ‘An Elusive Red Figure…,’ Horn would describe the events of weather, private life and anything notable that came to mind or hand at the time.

Drawing has been a defining element of Horn’s artistic practice since the 1980s and ‘An Elusive Red Figure…’ is emblematic of Horn’s relationship with the medium, which she has described as ‘a kind of breathing activity on a daily level.’ Whilst creating the drawings on paper that would become the paired ink jet prints for ‘An Elusive Red Figure…’, Horn would describe the events of weather, private life and anything notable that came to mind or hand at the time. One set of prints notes the temperature during a trip that the artist took to Zurich in July in 2019, others feature photographs of the artist, or cultural figures such as Aretha Franklin or Elizabeth Taylor, pasted alongside drawings or notations. Another page coloured bright yellow is inscribed with the line ‘I am paralyzed with hope’ from a monologue by the stand-up comedian Maria Bamford, which Horn describes as a ‘poignant connection to our time with regards to politics and the environment and now, of course, in relation to the pandemic’.

Roni Horn

from ‘An Elusive Red Figure’, 2022
Two ink jet prints on rag paper. Bleed images, floated edge-to-edge in frame, edition of 12

Roni Horn

from ‘An Elusive Red Figure’, 2022
Two ink jet prints on rag paper. Bleed images, floated edge-to-edge in frame, edition of 12

15 February 2019

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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