Roni Horn

Roni Horn was born in New York City on 24 September 1955. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 1975, and went on to earn an MFA in sculpture from Yale University School of Art in 1978. She divides her time between New York and Reykjavík, and Iceland has remained a sustained presence in her thinking and her work across decades.

Horn's practice moves fluidly across sculpture, photography, installation, and language, held together by a persistent inquiry into identity, perception, and the instability of meaning. Her early mature work, the Pair Objects series of the 1980s and early 1990s, established a structural logic that would run through everything that followed: identical or closely related objects placed in separate locations, making the act of comparison — and the differences that comparison reveals — the subject of the work itself. That interest in doubling and variation extended into photography with You Are the Weather (1994–96), a photographic installation of repeated close-up portraits of a woman in Icelandic geothermal water, in which minute shifts across hundreds of images transform portraiture into a study of perception and emotional flux. This Is Me, This Is You (1997–2000) continued this investigation through serial photographic arrangement, exploring intimacy, resemblance, and the instability of identity across familial relationships. The ongoing project Key and Cue (1994–2011) brought text and image into sustained dialogue, examining how verbal description and visual identity resist and complicate each other.

Horn's cast-glass sculptures represent another defining body of work. Pieces such as Bird (2008–09), Pink Tons (2008), and Opposite of White (2006–07) present apparently solid objects that behave optically as translucent, reflective, and spatially ambiguous forms — their meaning and appearance shifting with the viewer's movement and the changing quality of light. Among her most ambitious projects is Library of Water (2003–07), a permanent installation in a former library in Stykkishólmur, Iceland, comprising twenty-four glass columns filled with water drawn from different Icelandic glaciers. The work brings together sculpture, architecture, geology, climate, and language, making environmental change materially and poetically present.

Horn has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, among others. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Museum Folkwang in Essen, as well as by the Jumex Collection in Mexico City and the Winsing Arts Foundation in Taipei. She has been represented by Hauser & Wirth in London and New York and by Xavier Hufkens in Brussels, with solo presentations continuing at Hauser & Wirth through 2024 and 2026. In 2013, she received the Joan Miró Award, presented by the Fundació Joan Miró.