Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Roni Horn is one of the rare living artists to have understood that art is not made in certainty, but in voluntary discomfort. For nearly fifty years, this New Yorker has stubbornly refused to offer you what you expect. No stable visual signature, no reassuring statements, no convenient manifesto. Instead, she throws you into a labyrinth of cast glass, serial photographs, cut-out drawings, and floating texts where each work seems to contradict the previous one while whispering secrets to it. Her work is not a brand, it is a state of being that refuses assignment.
The paradox as territory
Glass, Horn’s preferred material since the mid-1990s, embodies all the conceptual perversity of her approach. These massive sculptures, which can weigh up to five tons, possess the disturbing quality of being both solid and liquid. Because technically, glass is a supercooled liquid, a material that refuses to choose its side between states of matter. The upper surfaces of her pieces, fire-polished, curve slightly like water held by surface tension. One believes to be looking into a miniature pool, but one is actually observing a compact mass of matter frozen in an intermediate state. This fundamental ambiguity is not just a technical feat, it is an embodied metaphor of identity itself: never fixed, always becoming, stubbornly refractory to definition.
Works like Pink Tons (2008), a pink glass cube weighing more than four tons, or the Well and Truly series (2009-2010), composed of ten glass cylinders in shades of pale blue and green, illustrate this material philosophy. These sculptures constantly change according to natural light, weather conditions, and viewer position. They refuse any stable visual identity. What you see in the morning is no longer what you will see in the afternoon. Horn calls this a watery “oculus,” and she is right: these objects are windows onto instability itself.
The double as a method of anxiety
Horn works obsessively in pairs, in series, in repetitions that are never really repetitions. Her work Things That Happen Again: For Two Rooms (1986) places two identical machined copper cylinders in two separate spaces. The viewer sees the first, then enters another room to face the second. It is impossible to compare them side by side, impossible to verify their supposed identity. This experience generates a dull unease: is your memory reliable? Are the objects really identical? Are you yourself the same between the first and the second room? Horn uses doubling not to reassure through symmetry, but to install doubt. She forces you to recognize that your own presence, your own temporality, is what activates and modifies the work. You are not a neutral observer, you are the factor of instability.
This strategy of doubling reaches its peak in You Are the Weather (1994-1996), one hundred close-up photographs of a woman named Margret immersed in different Icelandic thermal springs. The variations in expression are minimal, almost imperceptible, determined by the weather conditions at the time of shooting. The face becomes landscape, the weather becomes emotion, identity becomes flux. Fifteen years later, Horn photographs the same woman again in You Are the Weather, Part 2 (2010-2011), documenting the passage of time with the same relentless methodology. Time is no longer abstract; it is inscribed in wrinkles, subtle changes in the gaze, the gravity that pulls on the flesh. It is tender brutality, clinical poetry.
Emily Dickinson: the architecture of absence
Horn’s obsession with the American poet Emily Dickinson is not just a cultural reference; it is a deep structural affinity. Dickinson (1830-1886), who wrote nearly eighteen hundred poems of which fewer than ten were published in her lifetime, shared with Horn a taste for chosen seclusion, for working in solitude as an act of resistance. Dickinson used the dash as an instrument of suspension, of refusal of conclusion. Her short poems, untitled, rejected the metrical conventions of her time. She created white spaces, silences loaded with meaning, deliberate ambiguities. In her work, identity was always plural, unstable, subject to metamorphosis. The “I” in her poems was never fixed; it changed masks, gender, state of being.
Horn created several series of works based on Dickinson’s poetry. In When Dickinson Shut Her Eyes (1993), she transforms the first lines of poems into square aluminum rods of different lengths, leaning against a wall, with the text embedded in black cast plastic. The words become three-dimensional objects, poetry becomes sculpture. But above all, Horn frees the lines from the page, giving them a physical presence in space. Language is no longer just read; it is physically experienced. The series Key and Cue continues this posthumous collaboration, using fragments of Dickinson’s poems as raw material for meditations on memory, identity, and temporality.
What fundamentally links Horn to Dickinson is their shared refusal of easy symbolism. Dickinson wrote: “To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee.” This precision, this attention to concrete detail rather than abstraction, is found throughout Horn’s work. Both women work through the accumulation of tiny details rather than grand gestures. They understand that the immense is hidden in the infinitesimal, that the whole is revealed in the fragment. Dickinson spoke of “Circumference,” that line which defines the limits of human experience while suggesting the unlimited beyond. Horn creates glassy “oculus” that function exactly according to the same principle: openings that are also boundaries, windows onto the unfathomable.
The solitude chosen by both women is not an escape but a working method. Dickinson withdrew to her room, wore only white, refused most visits. Horn has traveled alone in Iceland since 1975, isolating herself in hostile landscapes, sleeping in abandoned lighthouses. This voluntary seclusion creates the conditions for extreme attention. Without social distraction, without the noise of the world, one can observe the subtlest changes: light variations on water, micro-expressions on a face, the almost imperceptible tremors of identity. Both artists understood that solitude is not the absence of relationship, but the most intense possible relationship with the non-human world: the weather, geology, language itself.
Dickinson often wrote about death and immortality, not as theological abstractions but as concrete, almost tactile experiences. She materialized the immaterial. Horn does exactly the opposite: she immaterializes the material. Her massive glass sculptures seem to float, her photographs of Thames water in Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) (1999) are annotated with footnotes telling stories of suicides and desires, transforming the black water into narrative testimony. For both women, the boundary between physical and psychic, between material and spiritual, becomes porous to the point of indistinction.
The architecture of instability: building with emptiness
If one had to identify an architectural form corresponding to Horn’s work, it would be neither monument nor cathedral, but the lighthouse. No wonder she lived in an Icelandic lighthouse in 1982 to create the series Bluff Life. The lighthouse is a structure that exists to create emptiness: a beam of light that cuts through darkness, a space of watchfulness and solitude, a landmark that precisely signals the danger it allows to avoid. The architecture of the lighthouse is functional but symbolic, pragmatic but poetic.
Her most ambitious work architecturally is undoubtedly Vatnasafn/Library of Water (2007), a permanent installation in the old library building of Stykkishólmur, Iceland. Horn replaced the books with twenty-four glass columns filled with water from melted ice of twenty-four different glaciers. The ochre rubber floor is inlaid with words in English and Icelandic describing both weather conditions and human states: “cold,” “calm,” “fierce,” “suddalegt” (an Icelandic word meaning both damp weather and an unpleasant person). The words become an emotional climate that you physically pass through while walking in the space.
Traditional architecture aspires to permanence. Libraries are monuments to preservation, fortresses against oblivion. Horn subverts this function by creating a library of water rather than books, an archive of the transient rather than the permanent. Water, unlike books, contains no stable information. It reflects, it distorts, it constantly changes. Some columns have remained cloudy and opaque, others are perfectly clear. All vary according to the light, the time of day, the season. This library does not archive the past, it records the perpetual present.
Architectural space in Horn’s work is never neutral. In her photographic installations such as You Are the Weather, the images are not simply hung on the walls; they create an immersive environment, a “surround” that unfolds within the gallery space. The viewer is surrounded by faces, encircled by gazes, compelled to turn around to see everything. This spatial arrangement transforms observation into a forced choreography. You cannot take in everything at a glance; you must move, pivot, go back. The exhibition’s architecture becomes an architecture of temporal experience.
Let us compare this to the architecture of the Pantheon in Rome, built in the second century AD, with its central oculus open to the sky. This oculus, the building’s only source of light, creates a direct link between the sacred interior space and the outer cosmos. Rain enters through this opening, sun rays draw arcs through the space over the course of the day. Architecture ceases to be a protection against the elements and becomes a frame that incorporates them. Horn’s glass sculptures with their “oculus” surfaces operate on a similar principle: they do not separate inside from outside, they create a zone of indistinction where the two interpenetrate.
Twentieth-century modernist architecture, embodied by Mies van der Rohe and his famous “less is more,” aspired to complete transparency, to the erasure of the wall between inside and outside. But this transparency was illusory, based on a naive faith in the neutrality of material. Horn understands that transparency is never neutral, that it is always charged, always bearer of distortions. Her glass does not seek to disappear; it asserts its material presence while offering an illusion of fluidity. It is an architecture that refuses the false promise of transparency while exploring its aesthetic possibilities.
In her rubber works such as Agua Viva (2004), which incorporates fragments of Clarice Lispector’s text into rubber floor tiles, Horn creates a literal architecture that the viewer must cross. The text is no longer something read from a distance; it is something trodden upon, crushed, worn. This brutal materialization of language transforms reading into physical action. The architecture of the floor becomes an architecture of meaning, where walking becomes interpreting.
Iceland as co-author
Iceland is not simply a subject for Horn; it is a fully fledged collaborator. Since her first trip in 1975, she has regularly returned to this volcanic island whose young and brutal geology seems to correspond to something in her psyche. She obtained Icelandic citizenship by parliamentary decree in 2023, an official recognition of a relationship of nearly fifty years. Her book series To Place (1990-), now comprising eleven volumes, documents this obsessive relationship. These are not travel guides but meditations on how a place can shape consciousness.
Iceland offers Horn what she seeks: productive discomfort, the feeling of being exposed to the elements, the absence of mediation between oneself and nature. In landscapes where the weather conditions change every ten minutes, where volcanic formations create a foreign geometry, where isolation is structural rather than accidental, Horn finds the ideal conditions for her work. She said that Iceland is a verb whose action is “to focus”. This enigmatic phrase means that Iceland does not function as a backdrop but as an active force that concentrates attention, constantly bringing back to the raw present.
The Icelandic landscape appears in her work not as a picturesque representation but as a geological presence. In Pi (1998), forty-five color images taken over six years in Iceland document light, water, rock formations with an almost scientific precision. But this documentation is not objective, it is deeply subjective, recording as much the artist’s psychic state as the physical conditions of the place. The landscape becomes a psychoscape, the geology becomes psychogeology.
Photography as a temporal trap
Photography for Horn is never a decisive moment in the Cartier-Bresson sense. It is a process of accumulation, variation, obsessive repetition. In Portrait of an Image (with Isabelle Huppert) (2005-2006), she photographs the French actress embodying her own film characters. Fifty images of Huppert imitating Huppert imitating Emma Bovary, or Béatrice in La Dentellière, or her other iconic roles. This vertiginous mise en abyme raises the question: where does authentic identity begin and where does performance end? Huppert, whom Horn describes as “anti-iconic” in opposition to Marilyn Monroe, rejects fixity. Each role adds a layer of complexity to her public persona rather than reducing it to an essence.
Huppert’s choice is no accident. The French actress is famous for taking risks, playing psychologically complex and often disturbing characters. She does not seek to be loved by the public; she seeks the truth of the character, however ugly it may be. This artistic integrity echoes Horn’s own approach. Both women refuse ease, refuse to give the public what it expects. They work in discomfort as a method.
In Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) [1], fifteen photographic lithographs of the Thames’ surface are annotated with footnotes that tell anecdotes, reflections, narrative fragments. A woman in a yellow Ford Fiesta throws herself into the river with her Irish setter. The water is black, turbid, sexy according to Horn. These notes transform images of water surfaces into narrative testimonies, repositories of all the stories that happened in and around the river. Photography ceases to be documentation to become fiction, or rather it reveals that every documentation contains fiction, that every gaze is already interpretation.
Drawing as breathing
Horn said that drawing is for her “a form of daily breathing activity.” It is the only practice in her work where she maintains direct contact with the material, without technical mediation, without outsourced production. Every day, she draws. This monastic discipline creates continuity, a red thread through an otherwise fragmented corpus. The drawings are cut and reassembled, creating multiple “centers,” islands of lines and marks. They are covered with what she calls “fine drizzle,” that is, a fine rain of pencil notes where drawing becomes writing and writing becomes drawing.
The Wits’ End series plays with idioms and proverbs, deconstructing them to create absurd expressions. Words are her images, and she paints them expressionistically. In LOG (March 22, 2019 – May 17, 2020), over four hundred works on paper daily document the pandemic period. Collages of found texts, newspaper headlines, old film photographs, weather bulletins. The last entry bears the paradoxical inscription: “I am paralyzed with hope” (Je suis paralysé par l’espoir). This phrase perfectly captures the contradictory energy of all of Horn’s work: the stillness that contains movement, despair that contains hope, paralysis that is itself a form of action.
The refusal of commodification
In a world of art dominated by overproduction, by factory workshops employing hundreds of assistants to meet market demands, Horn maintains a restrained production. She meticulously controls how her work is presented, refusing LED lighting that “completely flattens the work,” insisting on natural light. Her exhibitions do not always travel. Her major retrospective at the Reykjavík Art Museum in 2009, My Oz, remained in Iceland, a deliberate refusal of the usual international circulation. This gesture asserts that place matters, that context is constitutive of the work.
She does not produce for an abstract audience but according to an inner necessity. When this necessity disappears, she stops. She has declared that she is finished with glass sculptures, finished with the Dickinson series. These works now exist in the world, autonomous. This ability to close a chapter and move on without nostalgia is rare. Most artists exploit their successes to exhaustion. Horn refuses this capitalist extraction logic applied to her own creativity.
Her attitude toward artistic identity reflects this same integrity. She has lived her life in a “light state of cross-dressing,” refusing to strongly identify with a gender, refusing to participate in the queer scene even if her work resonates deeply with fluid identity questions. This outsider position is not a pose but a necessity. She says: “I’m not sure I’m a visual artist.” This statement is not false modesty but recognition that her work exceeds available categories.
Towards a conclusion that is not one
Let’s face it: Roni Horn’s work resists conclusion. It is built on the refusal of closure, on the insistence that all identity, all form, all meaning is provisional. Her circles can always be surrounded by other circles, to paraphrase Emerson, whom Dickinson read diligently. Each answer generates new questions, each clarity reveals new opacities.
What makes Horn essential today, in 2025, as we live in a culture obsessed with fixed identity, rigid categories, constant self-performance on social media, is precisely her refusal to play this game. She insists that identity is fluid, contextual, temporal. She shows us that strength does not lie in fixity but in the ability to change, adapt, stay open despite discomfort.
Her work is an antidote to branding, to the commodification of artistic identity. It is a reminder that art can still function as a space of resistance, as a place where certainties are suspended rather than reinforced. In a world saturated with images, Horn creates images that demand time, require sustained attention, refuse rapid consumption.
The beauty of her glass sculptures is not gratuitous; it is an artifact of her conceptual process. She does not seek to seduce but to disturb, to instill a productive doubt. This beauty is a consequence, not an objective. It comes as a side effect of intellectual rigor, material integrity, and obsessive attention to detail.
Horn’s legacy will be this demonstration that it is possible to maintain a rigorous artistic practice without compromise, without concessions to the market, without sacrificing complexity for clarity. It shows that one can be deeply conceptual while creating sensual objects, that one can be philosophically sophisticated while remaining accessible to direct experience. Her work proves that ambiguity is not confusion but richness, that uncertainty is not weakness but courage.
So yes, Roni Horn is difficult. She refuses to make it easy for you. She does not explain her works to you, does not give you the keys to interpretation. She forces you to be present, to look carefully, to doubt what you see. And that is exactly what we need: artists who refuse to infantilize us, who treat us as adults capable of tolerating discomfort and ambiguity. Horn does not give you answers; she gives you better questions. And in a world saturated with false certainties, that is the greatest gift an artist can offer.
- Roni Horn, Still Water (The River Thames, for Example), 1999, Museum of Modern Art, New York
