Anthology of Roni Horn

After its passing through the Joan Miro Foundation in Barcelona, CaixaForum Madrid presents from Friday, November 14^th, the exhibition 'Todo dormía como si el universo fuera un error', dedicated to the artist Roni Horn (New York, 1955), winner of the 2013 Joan Miro Prize. The xhibit is an anthology, conceived by the own artist, that explores the different resources that she has used over the last twenty years.

CaixaForum and Joan Miro Foundation organize for the second time a major retrospective exhibition dedicated to Joan Miro Prize winner, an award given to Horn in 2013, the third consecutive woman who gets this recognition. The exhibition will see the different records of her work, from the now famous photographic series, through her drawings, poetic objects and the large piece floor dedicated to Clarice Lispector, even the more recent installations made with glass blocks.

The exhibition will offer to the visitor a unique selection of works that will make him look and live together the work conceived by the artist as perceptual and epistemological experience.

Impact and melancholy

Horn is an enthusiastic of portrait and landscape, in love with sculpture and drawing passionate. She gives herself to a creative work resulting as shocking as melancholic. Her interest in the landscape of Iceland, where she lives and works part of the year, it helps to understand a look that delights in hardness but also in the simplicity, the strength but also the ethereal, the absolute and the melancholy. Her aim is to explore how the world is changing, unstable, insecure, uncertain and mysterious.

The landscapes, people, time and the art works move, evolve, are always conditioned by the context. For her, even the identity is unstable: it is a function of a place and a specific time. So she likes to work thinking of specific locations. Hers is an art that comes to occupy a given space.

Topics and formats

In this exhibition  main themes and formats that conform the work of Horn are included: sculptural installations, photographic series, procedural drawings and a piece for the floor, Rings of Lispector (Água Viva), which combines literary quotes with drawing. The title, Todo dormía como si el universo fuera un error, it's a phrase from Livro do desassossego by Fernando Pessoa, published in 1935.

The exhibition offers an overall experience, as if it were a large installation consisting of the set of exhibits. The selection of works is a compendium of the elements of the creative process of the artist: people, landscape, light, words, water, presence, glass, faces, forms, change, series, and space, appearance of self or time.

It also has a room dedicated to her procedural drawings. As in the case of Joan Miro, the drawing has been an essential part of the work of the artist in the last thirty years; according to her, is her primary activity from where all her works depart, whatever its material or final format.

Source: hoyesarte.com