Roni Horn: Untitled (“One can recognize…”)

“I am still bewildered and enchanted by landscape. It is exclusively experiential. There is no other way to know it. A landscape is something that is too complex in itself to express in any other form. It is experiential or it is nothing.” –Roni Horn
 

Castello di Ama is pleased to announce a new site-dependent sculpture by the celebrated American artist Roni Horn: Untitled (“One can recognize a great cold [in Yakutsk], she explains to me, by the bright, shining mist that hangs in the air. When a person walks, a corridor forms in this mist. The corridor has the shape of that person’s silhouette. The person passes, but the corridor remains, immobile in the mist.”). This marks the 15th in a series of permanent artworks realized for Castello di Ama for Contemporary Art.

Since the early 1980s, Roni Horn has created a singular body of work that combines Conceptual rigour, poetic resonance, and formal invention. Her heterogeneous practice includes sculpture, photography, drawing, and artists books. Horn is interested in the experiential dimension of things. Taken as a whole, her work is a sustained exploration of the complexities and contradictions of perception, sexuality, memory, and identity.

In Untitled (“One can recognize…”), Horn has sited a round glass element in a rustic room tucked away in one corner of the Villa Ricucci. The artist has staged an unmediated encounter, precisely scripted yet metaphorically open, with the inherent properties of her chosen material. The glass element is illuminated solely with natural light from a single window, and its pale bluish white colour alters with the hours of the day and the changing seasons. The specific light quality of Chianti is thus given a material presence that resembles a complex landscape. The dialectical interplay between light and glass precipitates in the viewer an awareness of the instability and mutability of perception and identity. In Horn’s words: “Coupled or double identity is something that shows up in all my work. I am fascinated by things that are not what they appear to be. As well, I am interested in things that don’t reduce. Things that, by nature, are complex.” Perplexing yet beautiful in its irreducibility, Untitled (“One can recognize…”) makes a paired form with the unique identity of Castello di Ama.

Curated by Philip Larratt-Smith.