Roni Horn
1955–
Since the mid-1970s, Roni Horn has produced a visually rich body of work that includes sculpture, drawing, photography, and artist’s books—a diverse corpus that often proves difficult to categorize. Geometric sculptures cast in metal, plastic, or glass echo the rigorous, abstract forms and industrial fabrication processes associated with Minimalism. Yet Horn is also concerned with how objects respond to each other and to their sites of display, and is significantly more invested in the affective qualities of her subjects than were many of her predecessors in the late 1960s.
The sixty-four individual photographs that comprise Ellipsis (II) record the mazelike spaces inside the changing rooms of an indoor public pool in Reykjavík, Iceland, a country Horn has visited regularly since 1975. The large-scale grid of black-and-white photographs juxtaposes cropped views of the space’s tiled walls, which curve around corners to form continuous surfaces; deep vistas of its receding corridors, on occasion occupied by a towel-wrapped swimmer; and close-ups of its numbered doorways. Oversized peepholes in the doors and reflections in mirrors of the edgeless tiles add to the work’s sense of voyeurism. No single print could describe the locker room’s labyrinthine design. Rather, as Horn explained, “In Ellipsis you don’t really see what you’re looking at until you’ve seen it all, until you’ve looked at all of the sixty- four photographs. In the cumulative differences and similarities of the images and in the search it poses—the experience of the original space unfolds.”
Introduction
Roni Horn (born September 25, 1955) is an American visual artist and writer. The granddaughter of Eastern European immigrants, she was born in New York City, where she lives and works. She is currently represented by Xavier Hufkens in Brussels and Hauser & Wirth. She is openly gay.
Wikidata identifier
Q433895
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed July 10, 2025.
Introduction
American artist.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, author, conceptual artist, environmental artist, installation artist, photographer, sculptor, writer
ULAN identifier
500062257
Names
Roni Horn, Romi Horn
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed July 10, 2025.
