Roni Horn

“The Selected Gifts, 1974-2015” is a multipart photographic work by the American artist Roni Horn at the Fondation Beyeler. Since the beginning of her career in the late 1970s, Roni Horn, who was born in New York in 1955, has worked with visually and materially diverse media: she creates drawings, photographs, texts, artists’ books and sculptures.

There are themes that recur in many of Horn’s works. They primarily include the mutability and multiplicity of identity as well as the capacity of art to recognize the divergence between the essence of a thing and its visual appearance. The deliberate, playful use of language and text always plays an important role in Horn’s oeuvre.

As the title itself indicates, the objects photographed are gifts that Roni Horn has received over the past forty years, more or less since the beginning of her career. They include books, a love letter, drawings and photographs by friends, the petrified egg of a dinosaur, a stuffed swan. The significance, history and material value of these objects are hard to determine.

These extremely diverse objects are recorded photographically with an “objective” gaze and printed in one of five formats of the same height. With a few exceptions all objects are reproduced actual size. The photographs of the selected gifts have a documentary function. At the same time – particularly when seen as a group – they constitute a possible portrait of the artist, as mirrored in the gift givers choice.

until 1 January 2017
Roni Horn – “The Selected Gifts, 1974-2015”
curated by Theodora Vischer
Fondation Beyeler
Baselstrasse 101, Basel