Roni Horn

Long-term view, Dia Beacon

Roni Horn, installation view, Dia Beacon, New York, 2025–26. © Roni Horn. Photo: Don Stahl

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Overview

Since the late 1970s, Roni Horn has developed an expansive practice encompassing drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, and text. Her works are discrete and multifaceted, yet they are unified by an abiding conceptual focus on questions of perception and the fluidity of identity—of the object and of oneself—as conditioned by varying circumstances. While the examination of materials’ properties is a significant aspect of Minimalism, Horn’s work critiques the movement’s notion of the autonomous art object, allowing human subjectivity to shape it. The work is the process of becoming; it happens in the encounter with the viewer, repeatedly. The selection on view exemplifies the artist’s early exploration of how we experience of the physical reality of chosen media—forms, materiality, presence—through nuanced spatial compositions. Key to the contingent nature of her work is the investigation of how a material’s presence is heightened and doubling as both a visual and conceptual approach. Elements in Horn’s work are reiterated, defining themselves through differences as well as varying distances from one another.

Roni Horn is curated by Donna De Salvo, senior adjunct curator, special projects, with Min Sun Jeon, assistant curator.

Roni Horn is made possible by Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis, Kukje Art and Culture Foundation, Peter Lund, and Nina and Michael Zilkha.

All exhibitions at Dia are made possible by the Economou Exhibition Fund.

Since the late 1970s, Roni Horn has developed an expansive practice encompassing drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, and text. Her works are multifaceted yet unified by an abiding conceptual focus on questions of perception and the fluidity of identity—of the object and of oneself—as conditioned by changing circumstances. While the examination of materials’ properties is a significant aspect of Minimalism, Horn’s work critiques the movement’s notion of the autonomous art object, allowing human subjectivity to shape it. The work is the process of becoming; it happens in the encounter with the viewer, repeatedly. The selection on view exemplifies the artist’s early exploration of how we experience the physical reality of chosen media—forms, materiality, presence—through nuanced spatial compositions. Key to the contingent nature of her work is the investigation of how a material’s presence is heightened and doubling as both a visual and conceptual approach. Elements in Horn’s work are reiterated, defining themselves through differences as well as varying distances from one another.

During the 1980s, Horn spent a concentrated period manipulating the qualities of heavy metals. For Mass Removal II and III (both 1982–83), the artist cast lead in green sand before carving it with a pneumatic tool to achieve a hollowed, elongated shape with rough surfaces, leaving behind a residual structure. Neither fully solid nor entirely void, these works underscore the material’s ambiguity—weighty yet vulnerable—and bear traces of process and time. The four geometrically refined volumes from the Space Buttress series (1984–85), made of lead, were similarly cast and carved but then finished with a file to flatten their tops and bottoms and establish specific angles as they sit on the floor. In Object of Constancy (1980), seven rods of lead form a spiraling coil, inducing a sense of movement and pliability that belie the metal’s perceived inertness. In this way, these sculptures draw parallels between the nature of materials and the contingency of identity.

For Post Work 3 (1986), comprising six rods topped with squared-off weights and propped against the wall, Horn used iron casting to highlight the metal’s texture, density, and malleability. Subtly distinct in their top forms, the units establish diverse relationships among themselves, rejecting the possibility of being experienced as a single, isolated element. Horn’s interest in doubling is crystallized in the two truncated copper cones of Things That Happen Again (1986/90), which were created through a machining process. The cones are conditioned by their relational context, assuming one of four “identities” according to their arrangement—here, in a single room as A This and That—and encouraging the viewer to navigate their place within unique temporal and spatial dimensions. In Horn’s words: “The installation of these forms reflects an acute awareness of circumstantial reality. . . . The simple state of doubleness includes, as integral, the space or interval between.”

Horn’s drawings inhabit the interstitial spaces between the exhibition’s three galleries, inflecting the viewer’s movement through the installation. Contemporary with the metal sculptures, the works on paper consist of powdered pigment mixed with turpentine and finished with varnish, the pigments’ materiality enhanced by their vibrant chromatic range as well as the contours of the sculptures. For these drawings, Horn segmented paper into what she refers to as “plates” and reassembled them, the irregular cut lines marking the physical displacement and construction of space. The idea of doubling reemerges through paired forms with subtle variations that distinguish one from the other.

In its deceptively simple form, Horn’s work demands a heightened attention to discern how each object activates its environment to produce different sensations in the subject; it forges its own place within ever-shifting coordinates, rather than merely responding to a specific site. Within her carefully considered layouts, the interrelationships between works and the viewer unfold through a perpetual process of reflection. These conditions are only fully realized in the viewer’s presence. Together, informing one another, the object and the subject allow what the artist describes as “recognition, meaning, [and] identity to gather.”

—Donna De Salvo and Min Sun Jeon

Post Work 3, 1986
Cast iron, 6 parts
Dia Art Foundation; gift of Graham Steele and Ulysses de Santi

Double I I’, 1986–87

Double N N’, 1986–87

Untitled (Hamilton), 1984

Brooklyn Red, 1985

Hamilton Red, 1984–85

Hamilton Red, 1984

Brooklyn Green, 1986

Brooklyn Gray, 1985

Brooklyn White, 1986

This 1, 1986

Brooklyn Gray, 1985

Brooklyn White, 1986

Brooklyn Red, 1985

Brooklyn Red, 1985

2–15: Powdered pigment, graphite, charcoal, colored pencil, and varnish on paper
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Things That Happen Again, 1986/90
Forged copper, 2 parts
Dia Art Foundation

Object of Constancy, 1980
Lead
Dia Art Foundation

Mass Removal III, 1982–83
Cast lead
Dia Art Foundation

Mass Removal II, 1982–83
Cast lead
Dia Art Foundation; gift of Graham Steele and Ulysses de Santi

Space Buttress III, 1984–85
Cast lead
Dia Art Foundation

Space Buttress I, 1984–85
Cast lead
Dia Art Foundation

Space Buttress II, 1984–85
Cast lead
Dia Art Foundation

Space Buttress IV, 1984–85
Cast lead
Dia Art Foundation

Roni Horn was born in New York in 1955. Her practice spans a range of media, including drawing, sculpture, photography, installation, and text. She received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, in 1975, and an MFA from Yale University, New Haven, in 1978. Since her first solo show at the Kunstraum in Munich in 1980, Horn’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, such as Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, Tate Modern, London (2009), and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2009–10); Roni Horn: When I Breathe, I Draw, Menil Drawing Institute, Houston (2019); and Roni Horn: Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2024). Horn’s work has been included in major group exhibitions such as Documenta IX, Kassel (1992), and the Venice Biennale (1997 and 2003), among others. Horn’s first presentation with Dia, Roni Horn: Part I and Part II, was on view at Dia Center for the Arts, New York, from 2001 to 2002. Horn lives in New York.