February 27, 2018
Art

By: Kevin Greenberg
Portrait by: Mario Sorrenti

Photographer’s assistants: So Yoshimura and Kotaro Kawashima. Lighting by Lars Beaulieu. Set design by Philipp Haemmerle. Set designer’s assistant: Ryan Stenger. Digital technicians: Kotaro Kawashima and Chad Meyer. Casting by The Last Universe. Production by Katie Fash and Steve Sutton. Printing by Arc Lab Ltd.

Artwork imagery courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

NEW YORK BY THE LAST MAGAZINE: ARTIST RONI HORN FINDS IDEAS IN JAZZ AND NATURE

The artist Roni Horn’s New York was a place of pre-dawn space and stillness, with block after undeveloped downtown block peppered with vacant lots and suffused with “a beautiful feeling of wilderness,” she says. Horn, sixty-two, was born and raised in the city and moved in the late Seventies to Tribeca, then a forgotten urban corner of vacant manufacturing facilities slowly being converted into bare-bones live-work spaces by intrepid artists.

Horn recalls walking along the abandoned West Side Highway, standing in the shadow of the then-active High Line, gazing across the inky darkness of those unpopulated blocks toward New York’s distant urban core. “The whole neighborhood felt like a shadow,” she says. She spent her nights haunting the myriad jazz clubs that dotted the landscape downtown, absorbing sets by greats like Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, and Bill Evans.

Since the Eighties, Horn, a self-described “solitary person” whose work encompasses a number of mediums, has found her muse in the alien, inscrutable beauty of Iceland, a “geologically fresh” landscape characterized by vast fields of black volcanic rock, creeping neon lichen, and low, foreboding skies. Her creations traffic in the nuances of place—the subtleties of weather, the poetry and promise inherent in geology, the idea of the island, and the nature of water—as in sculptures like 2009’s Pink Tons, a rough glass cube which suggests the transparency and the mercurial nature of water’s appearance. This is Me, This is You, from 1998-2000, presents a photo grid of images of Horn’s niece, speaking to the persistent effect of time on identity and persona. Through the lens of Iceland, her subtle, seductive art, by turns clinical and sensual, underscores the mutability of identity and the fragile, fleeting nature of desire.

Roni Horn, ‘You are the Weather,’ 1994-1996 (detail).

Although she’s spent the better part of her career fixing her gaze firmly away from New York, Horn concedes that the untamed downtown scene of her youth made an indelible impact on her practice. The improvisatory skill of the jazz masters who flooded her ears with music and the city’s vibrant underground culture of sex and drugs, in which it was easy to get lost or try on different identities as one pleased, filtered obliquely into her art.

These days Horn mostly spends her time at her studio in upstate New York, away from the rabble of Manhattan, and is currently absorbed in completing a show of large-scale drawings (her largest to date) set for June in Zurich.

As for Iceland, it remains essential to Horn’s work, but visiting holds little appeal these days. The untrammeled vistas that so intoxicated her in the Eighties have been tarnished in recent years. “There are too many visitors, too many tourists,” she sighs. “And although I miss the landscape terribly, in its current form, I’d just rather not see it.”

Pick up our tenth-anniversary issue to see the entire portfolio of notable New Yorkers photographed by Mario Sorrenti and styled by George Cortina here.

Roni Horn, ‘Pink Tons,’ 2008-11. Photography by Genevieve Hanson.

Roni Horn, ‘This is Me, This is You,’ 1997-2000 (detail). Installation view, Dia Center for the Arts, New York, 2002.

By: Kevin Greenberg
Portrait by: Mario Sorrenti

Artwork imagery courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Von Ammon Co. Remakes the DC Gallery Scene

At his Georgetown space, curator Todd von Ammon establishes a new template for the modern-day art gallery, bringing stimulating work to the nation’s capital, from digital media to sculptures by Helmut Lang.

Russell Tovey Is Terrified of the Future

The English actor soldiers through a bleak future in the new HBO series Years and Years, illuminating the refugee crisis as the moral center of a Manchester family buffeted by a distressing world that is just like our own—only more so.

Christina Kruse Finds Her Balance

After experimenting with photography, collage, and painting, the German model-turned-artist explores a sense of equilibrium in a new gallery show of her intricate sculptures inspired by the Bauhaus movement.

Claire Oswalt Follows Her Intuition

After planning to study medicine before becoming a writer and now an artist, the Austin native approaches her raw, delicate paintings, collages, drawings, and textiles with an open mind and trusts in her own instincts to roam as freely as the Texas landscape allows.

Bari Ziperstein's Ceramics Bridge Art and Commerce

With practices spanning both fine art and design, the Los Angeles-based sculptor and ceramicist questions the consumerist system while taking part in it—all with a feminist perspective.

FUMI NAGASAKA STARTS A 'TEENAGE RIOT'

In her second book, the Japanese photographer captures the individual personalities and æsthetics of four adolescent girls in their hometowns in a collection that is both intimate and anthropological.

ARTIST CONIE VALLESE'S MOTHER AND GRANDMOTHER INSPIRED HER COLLECTION FOR AGMES

In her first jewelry collaboration, the painter and sculptor translates her large-scale plaster heads into necklaces, earrings, and brooches inspired by her family with the help of the two sisters behind sustainable line AGMES.

ECKHAUS LATTA MAKES ITS MUSEUM DÉBUT AT THE WHITNEY

For their first-ever museum exhibition, fashion groundbreakers Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta have created an immersive experience incorporating retail, art, and one-off clothing designs in their continuing drive to question established norms.

COLBY MUGRABI FINDS SURPRISING CONNECTIONS BETWEEN FASHION, ART, ARCHITECTURE, AND DESIGN ON MINNIE MUSE

Drawing on a wealth of visual knowledge gleaned from hours spent poring over books, Mugrabi reinterprets the concept of personal style to encompass art, architecture, and design as well in articles and her signature Muse Boards, which offer a new interpretation of the latest fashion collections.

BENOÎT MAIRE TURNS PHILOSOPHY INTO ART

The French artist pulls from his studies in philosophy and epistemology to create swirling abstract paintings and mixed-media sculptures assembled from found materials that touch on the basis of knowledge and rationality in the search for ultimate truth.

JENNA GRIBBON'S PAINTINGS SUBVERT THE MALE GAZE

The young painter reinvents centuries of art history in works that merge realism and abstraction, beauty and camp, and subversion and self-absorption.

MATS GUSTAFSON ILLUSTRATES THE BODY'S FRAGILITY IN 'NUDE'

In a book of watercolors, the Swedish artist and illustrator turns away from his fashion work for more intimate portraits that reflect the fragility of the human body as a protest against the slow response to the AIDS crisis.

NEW YORK BY THE LAST MAGAZINE: ARTIST BANKS VIOLETTE RETURNS TO THE ART WORLD AFTER HIS EARLY HEAVY METAL-INSPIRED CREATIONS

After bursting onto the New York art scene straight out of Columbia in the mid-2000s with his heavy metal-inspired works, the provocative artist is returning to the city from a stint upstate with newly sophisticated and subdued pieces.