ART CITIES: Milan-Roni Horn

Since the late 1970s, Roni Horn has produced drawings, photography, sculpture and installations, as well as works involving words and writing. Horn’s work, which has an emotional and psychological dimension, can be seen an engagement with post-Minimalist forms as containers for affective perception. She talks about her work being ‘moody’ and ‘site-dependent’. Her attention to the specific qualities of certain materials spans all mediums, from the textured pigment drawings, to the use of solid gold or cast glass, and rubber.

By Efi Miichalarou
Photo: Galleria Raffaella Cortese Archive

Drawing has been a central element in Horn’s practice for nearly 40 years, describing it as a “primary activity,” aimed at exploring linguistic limits and sculptural potential through processes of constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing images and texts. Galleria Raffaella Cortese presents a new solo show by Roni Horn, focused exclusively on drawings and works on paper. Installed across all three gallery spaces, the exhibition presents works from four recent series, made between 2016 and 2023, many of which have never been shown in Italy: “Frick and Fracks”, “Wits’ End Mash”, “An elusive Red Figure…”, and “Slarips”. While words are noticeably absent from the “Frick and Fracks”, all unique watercolours, both the series and its title allude to the idea of similarity and difference. The expression ‘frick frack’ has its origins in a Swiss comedy ice-skating partnership, Werner Groebli and Hans Mauch, whose stage names were Frick and Frack. Beginning in the 1930s, their association was so enduring (almost fifty years), and they were at one time so well known, that their names have entered the English language as slang for two people who are very close, practically inseparable, or sometimes indistinguishable. Horn’s vivid abstract shapes, placed side-by-side like upturned cards from a memory game, are non-identical pairs of pairs. In comparing and contrasting the forms, viewers become aware of the subtle correspondences and variances in the unique, hand-painted formations. In the “Wits’ End Mash” series the artist explores the complexities and ambiguities of language through handwritten idioms, clichés, and colloquialisms. ‘Away with the fairies’, ‘laugh my head off’ and ‘fly in the ointment’ are just a few of the peculiar yet recognisable phrases that she takes as source material. Horn asked 300 people to each commit five such vernacular phrases to paper, which she subsequently made into individual silkscreens. Each phrase is individually printed in a complex and layered process. Superimposed and overlapping, the words are sometimes legible, at other times indecipherable. Idioms, by definition, are phrases whose sense cannot be ascertained from the individual meanings of the constituent words: ‘up in the air’ means ‘undecided’, for example. This shift from recognition to incomprehension in “Wits’ End Mash”, as well as from readability to illegibility, gives charged visual expression to the ambiguities and vagaries of written and verbal communication. Words — both prosaic and factual — also play a crucial role in Red Figure, a new suite that can be read as an extension of “LOG” series, which consists of 406 works on paper that Horn created as part of a daily practice over fourteen months in 2019 and 2020. In a format resembling an open book, the artist juxtaposes a deeply personal selection of words and images across two adjacent sheets of paper: quotations, collages, photographs, film stills, screenshots, casual musings, information about the news and weather, not to mention personal lists and original texts. The result is an idiosyncratic body of work that not only affords an insight into the mind of the artist, but also echoes and reinforces the themes she frequently explores in her oeuvre. A detailed examination reveals the significance of place, with Iceland, New York and Austerlitz (NY) featuring heavily as the places where she primarily lives and works; travel (Zurich, London and the Grand Canyon); extreme weather conditions (from a searing heatwave in Switzerland to the phenomenon of ice eggs on a Finish beach), but also a poetic list of the many and varied words for rain in the English language (a response, perhaps, to the almost 100 words that exist for snow in Icelandic). The artist herself appears in several works, most notably in ‘Roni Horn’ by Liz Taylor (as a counterpoint to ‘Liz Taylor’ by Roni Horn). Animals and the natural world are another dominant theme: underwater species, a dog, a bear, and the rarest of all possible creatures, a white raven and a white giraffe. “An Elusive Red Figure…” is a suite of 33 paired ink jet prints. Following on from the 2021 work ‘LOG (March 22, 2019 – May 17, 2020)’, ‘An Elusive Red Figure…’ is a collection of outtakes from ‘LOG’ as well as original drawings, including quotations, collages, photographs, casual commentaries, notes on news and weather events and original texts by Horn. The series is emblematic of Horn’s relationship with the medium, which she has described as ‘a kind of breathing activity on a daily level.’ Whilst creating the drawings on paper that would become the paired ink jet prints for ‘An Elusive Red Figure…,’ Horn would describe the events of weather, private life and anything notable that came to mind or hand at the time. For her series, titled “Slarips” (the word ‘spirals’ written in reverse), Horn began by making watercolor spirals in an array of hues. She then cut up the painted images and collaged them together into new tessellated compositions. Each is titled with a deliberate misspelling of the word ‘spirals,’ signaling a profound departure from the work’s original source material.

Photo: Roni Horn, Skulls of the World Unite • Orange Hope</span>, 2022, Two pigment prints on rag paper. Bleed images, floated edge-to-edge in frame, 34,8 × 53,8 cm; 40 × 59,3 × 3 cm framed, Photo: Tom Powel, © Roni Horn, Courtesy the artist and Galleria Raffaella Cortese

Info: Galleria Raffaella Cortese, via stradella 7 / via stradella  1 & via stradella 4, Milan, Italy, Duration: 15/5-19/9/2025, Days & Hours: 10:00-13:00 & 14:30-19:00 https://raffaellacortese.com/