Roni Horn: Be water, my friend...

“Always the same, but always different”. That phrase could sum up the essence of the work of artist Roni Horn (New York, 1955), who presents at the Fundació Miró in Barcelona her first retrospective in Spain, after being awarded the Joan Miró Prize 2013.

Else 9, Roni Horn, 2010.

Con esta frase Horn habla de la dificultad de pintar un retrato a alguien. ¿Por qué? Porque somos cambiantes como el agua, un elemento fundamental en su obra. “Te pasas la vida en el agua, cerca de ella, eres agua. Puede convertirse en cualquier otra cosa, pero sigue siendo agua. Esta paradoja me fascina”.

This idea helps us understand Horn's work, and in particular the centrepiece of the show: Untitled. Ten green glass cylinders that look full of water, made with an advanced blowing technology so that, when light hits them, different opacities, colours and textures come through.

Untitled, by Roni Horn, at the Fundació Miró.

The artist pairs this installation with the opening of Shirley Jackson's horror novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, in what can be read as a reflection on the perception one has of oneself as against the one others have, sometimes intolerant of anything different.

It's her latest artwork, shown so far only at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York, and through it we see another constant in her production: the literary references, which work like a narrative, if ambiguous, introduction to her creations.

 

Rings of Lispector (Agua Viva), Roni Horn, 2004.

El título de la exposición, Todo dormía como si el universo fuera un error, está sacado del Libro del desasosiego de Fernando Pessoa. Y se incluyen piezas como Rings of Lispector, tapices de goma extendidos en el suelo con extractos de Agua viva, de Clarise Lispector, o White Dickinson, placas de aluminio con textos de Emily Dickinson.

Horn herself conceived this retrospective, an exploration of her main themes and formats across twenty years of career. Three categories as far as the latter go: sculptural installations, process drawings and photography.

The photographic series You are the Weather, Part 2 is key in her path: a hundred portraits of the same woman bathing in thermal waters in Iceland, her face changing with the conditions of the weather around her. In her own words: “Water changes state, weather changes everything”.

You are the Weather, Part 2, Roni Horn, 2011.

The Fundació Miró and Obra Social La Caixa have given her the Joan Miró Prize 2013 (previously awarded to the outstanding contemporary creators Olafur Eliasson (2007), Pipilotti Rist (2009) and Mona Hatoum (2011)), because, in the jury's words, over these two decades she “has never stopped moving audiences with a wide-ranging artistic practice that links aspects of nature, landscape, popular culture and other subjects associated with the material to mechanisms of perception and communication”.

The exhibition can be seen in Barcelona until 28 September and, after that, from 13 November to 1 March at CaixaForum in Madrid.