Artist's name: Roni Horn
My name: Eugene De La Rosa
Summary:
Roni Horn was born in New York in 1955, where she still
lives and works. She received a BFA from the Rhode Island
School of Design and an MFA from Yale University. She works
with several different mediums including sculpture,
photography, works on paper, and books. Since 1975, Horn
has traveled to Iceland; a place she claims has been of
significant influence to her work because of its landscape
and geographical location, specifically its isolation. She
has developed a series of art books since 1990 titled To
Place, in which she presents her relationship to Iceland.
Besides nature, questions of identity are also a central
theme in Horn’s work. In an interview with the Journal of
Contemporary Art, she said “The entrance to all my work is
the idea of an encyclopedia of identity.”
Asphere (1995), one of Horn’s works in display at the
Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts’ exhibit on
Portraiture/Homage/Embodiment is a particularly interesting
study of this theme of identity. On Asphere, in the same
interview with the Journal of Contemporary Art, she stated,
“To me it’s like an homage to androgyny. Androgyny is
the integration of difference as a source of identity. When
you combine the one with the other you come towards a
synthetic identity, one that is not so nameable.” Asphere
is, as its name suggests, a sphere-like sculpture made out
of stainless steel, weighing about 300 pounds. However,
it’s not a perfect sphere, and its dimensions are slightly
distorted. Only by close observation can one see this.
This, according to Horn, is what embodies the concept behind
the work. She says, “Asphere is about androgyny…because
it is not a sphere and it acquires no otherdiscrete
identity. And when you go away, it remains nameless.”
In relation to portraiture, Horn did not originally conceive
of Asphere as a self-portrait. However, she relates to it in
the following way: "I think of Asphere as a self-portrait.
I don't think I made it as a self portrait, but when I look
at it I see that it has characteristics that I identify with
very strongly." Her second work in display at the Pulitzer,
is related to Asphere in that it provides a conceptual
framework for it. According to the Pulitzer Foundation's
description, "This drawing suggests that the asphere form
can be understood as either integration or separation - as a
fusion of two similarly shaped figures or a splitting of one
original identity."