Santander, (EFE).- The Botín Center shows the work of the New Yorker Roni Horn in an exhibition that brings together three decades of her drawings, photographs, sculptures, writing and even a sound recording.
These pieces with very diverse languages, some unpublished, show his vision of identity as something fluid and changing.
“Hope paralyzes me” is the title of an exhibition that opens the 2023 calendar of the Botín Center and that can be visited from this Saturday, April 1, until September 10.
Horn in Spain 10 years later
Born in New York in 1955, Roni Horn returns to Spain ten years after her first exhibition, which took place in 2014 at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona, and also traveled to Madrid.
In Santander, he exhibits for the first time a new series of his iconic glass pieces, a type of sculpture linked to pure geological elements on which he began working in the nineties.
Conceived especially for the Botín Center, the series is shown in a room with large windows from which you can see the bay and the pieces, which on their surface appear liquid although they are solid, are transformed by the light.
The director of Exhibitions and the Collection of the Botín Center and curator of the exhibition, Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, explained that the artist has considered this space as a challenge, where her pieces change organically with the atmosphere and natural light as the hours go by, until they remain in the shadows.
paired portraits
The visitor is greeted by 15 paired portraits of the artist herself, 30 images that combine images from her childhood and adolescence with others from her adulthood, to talk about the multiple identity of the artist and those who contemplate them.
The exhibition also shows Horn’s “deep involvement” with weather and water, as a metaphor for identity again because “they are changing and elusive.”
It also shows fifteen photographs that are images of water, with different approaches to the River Thames as it passes through London, with its changes in texture and tonality.
For González-Torres and Laycock
And in the center of that body of water you can see “Gold mats, Paired -For Ross and Felix”, from 1994, a piece dedicated to the artist couple Félix González Torres and Ross Laycock, who found a special meaning in a previous piece, also made of sheets of gold leaf, “Gold field”, when Laycok was dying of AIDS.
It is also exhibited for the first time in an art center “LOG” (Record), a work that was produced daily until May 2020, in the midst of a pandemic.
It is a collection of drawings, quotes, collages, photographs, informal comments, news and weather notes, and original texts by Roni Horn.
The title of this exhibition “I am paralyzed with hope”, a phrase from the American comedian Maria Bamford, appears compulsively inscribed on several plates of this work.
Lola Camus
