Hauser & Wirth Zürich 23 March – 25 May 2013 Opening: Friday 22 March 6 – 8 pm
'I don't think of the object, the material thing or what is produced as the endpoint of a work. The aspiration is always the experience, which means the audience, the individual, is integral to the value of the work.' – Roni Horn
American artist Roni Horn will present a new glass sculpture at Hauser & Wirth Zürich, opening on 23 March. Shown alongside her photographic series 'Untitled (Weather)', this exhibition will showcase the artist's sculptural and photographic explorations into the effect of multiplicity on perception and memory.
Entitled 'Untitled ("Consider incompleteness as a verb.")', which references a passage from Canadian poet Anne Carson's book 'Plainwater', Horn's new sculpture is composed of two large glass cubes, which are matte on the sides with a smooth, glossed surface, resembling freshly cut blocks of ice. The cubes are made from a two-colour glass which reflect their surroundings. Each piece is a subtly different shade of blue and, depending on the type of light in the gallery, the time of day, and the weather outside, these shades shift from violet to lavender to aquamarine.
Horn's photographic work, 'Untitled (Weather)', will be displayed across from the new glass sculpture. 'Untitled (Weather)' is a series related to Horn's 'You are the Weather, Part 2' (2010 – 2011), the second part of a key work in Horn's oeuvre, 'You are the Weather' (1994 – 1996). 'Untitled (Weather)' consists of groups of photographs of a woman, bathing in the hot springs and pools in Iceland.
Like the varying hues of the glass work, in each photograph, the woman’s facial expressions shift and change subtly, reflecting the weather conditions around her.
Roni Horn was born in 1955 and lives and works in New York. Iceland, the artist's second home, has played an important role in her work since the 1970s.
In November 2009, Horn's comprehensive survey exhibition, 'Roni Horn aka Roni Horn' opened at the Tate Modern, London and travelled to Collection Lambert, Avignon, France (2009); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY (2009); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston MA (2010). Horn's recent, major solo exhibitions include 'Well and Truly', Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, Austria (2010); 'Photographien / Photographic Works', Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany (2011); and 'Selected Drawings 1984 – 2012', Hauser & Wirth Zürich, Switzerland (2012). In January 2013, she was awarded the Joan Miró Prize. In late 2013 the artist will present a solo exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The first major publication focused solely on Horn’s drawing practice was published by JRP Ringier in January 2013.
Djordje Ozbolt Who Say Jah No Dread
23 March – 25 May 2013, Hauser & Wirth Zürich Opening: Friday 22 March 6 – 8 pm
Hauser & Wirth is proud to present ‘Who Say Jah No Dread’, an exhibition of paintings and sculptures by Djordje Ozbolt. These new works combine Ozbolt’s impressions from his travels and personal experiences with iconography from different cultures and found images, all overlaid with the artist’s signature sharp wit and humour.
The centrepiece of ‘Who Say Jah No Dread’ is a totemic sculpture of animals stacked one on top of the other painted in rasta colours of black, red, yellow, and green. Featuring a dove perched on the extended finger of a chimpanzee, sitting on a kudu, on top of a cheetah, all resting on the back of an elephant, this work is a veritable menagerie in a riot of colour.
Ozbolt’s new paintings picture exotic settings with vibrant blue skies and dense, tropical foliage. The paradisical landscapes are populated by surreal creatures, such as a hybrid beast with a tiger’s head and a half-giraffe, half-zebra body, and animated African fetish sculptures shown dancing to Leonard Cohen’s 1984 hit, ‘Dance me till the end of love’, or gazing into the sunset in a romantic embrace.
In his paintings, Ozbolt has appropriated a wide variety of imagery from Botticelli’s ‘The Birth of Venus’ and the traditional still-life genre to depictions of the biblical story of Judith beheading Holofernes.
The collision of traditional European genres with stereotypically African motifs continues in Ozbolt’s series of pseudo-portraits, ‘Gentlemen of Ngongo’. Set against neutral grey backgrounds and wearing the aristocratic clothing of the Elizabethan era, each of Ozbolt’s subjects has an African mask for a head. Despite their frozen expressions, the costumes combined with the ornamentation and details of the masks lend each of the ‘Gentlemen of Ngongo’ a unique character.
The masks and fetish sculptures in these paintings are translated into three-dimensional form with Ozbolt’s new sculptures. Using mass-produced and kitsch ‘African’ objects that the artist purchased from flea markets and street vendors, Ozbolt’s series of fetish sculptures are adorned with the trappings of contemporary consumer culture, such as car tires and the hood ornament from a Mercedes Benz.
