Roni Horn (B. 1955)

Roni Horn’s Untitled bears witness to a concept that has come to define her oeuvre: the doubled image. For Horn, whose Post-Minimalist practice operates through a variety of fat and three-dimensional media, the strategy of pairing repeated objects is grounded in her fascination with processes of dislocation, memory and identity. As the artist explains, ‘I discovered quite early on that…a single object would not give me the kind of relationship I was interested in having with the viewer. Because its singularity leads more toward a separation from the viewer. So I arrived at the idea of the paired object, which diffused that possibility. The idea was to create a space in which the viewer would inhabit the work, or at least be a part of it’ (R. Horn, interview with J. Lingwood, quoted in Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London 2009, p. 111). Simultaneously affirming and destabilising each other’s presence, Horn’s doubled images prompt the viewer to see each individual iteration not as a fixed entity, but as a transitional piece of a larger scale puzzle: a puzzle in which, through repeated encounters with the same object, we are invited to contemplate the diffuse nature of our own existence.