Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, at the Tate Modern, Level 4

Roni Horn.?You are the Weather 1994-95?64 C-prints and 36 gelatin-silver prints?21.4 x 26.5 cm each, 100 units?Courtesy: The artist and Hauser & Wirth Zürich London?© Roni Horn

25 February - 25 May, 2009

This exhibition, the most significant overview of American artist Roni Horn’s practice to date, will show her earliest works from the mid-1970s alongside pieces from the intervening years and new sculptures. For “Roni Horn aka Roni Horn,” all the windows in Tate Modern’s west galleries will be uncovered so that Horn’s sculptures can be seen in shifting natural light.

Horn has always defined the meaning of her work, as the experience that the viewer has with it. In the 1980s she made pairs of copper objects and showed them in different relationships, for instance in two separate rooms. Unable to see both objects simultaneously, the viewer remembers one when encountering the next. Many of Horn’s works feature paired elements which might be similar or identical although the viewer’s experience with each is unique. The exhibition will include the diptych “Dead Owl,” 1997 and the sculpture “Paired Gold Mats - For Ross and Felix,” 1994. Pairing carries a different nuance in the latter, as it can be seen as a tribute to two lovers.

Many of Horn’s works are connected to her ideas about identity. Critical of fixed categories, she explores ideas around mutability and androgyny. Horn has written that “Androgyny is the possibility of a thing containing multiple identities.” Her work, as a whole, is formally and materially diverse, while individual works also explore change.

The exhibition also includes the three major photographic works: “This is Me, This is You” 1999-2000; “Cabinet Of” 2001 and “You are the Weather” 1994-95. Through them, spectators can appreciate the various ways in which Horn has explored the genre of portraiture.

A wide range of Horn’s drawings is included in the exhibition, from her 1982 series “Bluff Life” to recent works made by splicing together similar drawings and reconfiguring them on expansive surfaces with penciled annotations. Rarely shown in the UK, these drawings will be placed throughout the exhibition.

“Roni Horn aka Roni Horn” has been organized by Tate Modern and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The exhibition is curated by Mark Godfrey at Tate Modern and Donna de Salvo and Carter Foster at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It will travel to Collection Lambert in Avignon, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the ICA Boston.