Roni Horn

In this large installation, Horn has meticulously created ‘placing’ potential for the viewer, not by means of a natural landscape but rather through formalization. The work consists of eighteen identical pairs of forms made of solid copper or steel. Although each pair has a unique form, their rounded contours contain identical volumes. The interrelationship is clear, but every form is distinct, hermetic, enigmatic. The perfection and restraint of the objects is essential: the mass and the position of each one marks a place without transforming that place into something familiar right away.

The pairs are separated from each other in two adjoining spaces, so that two ‘fields’ with precisely the same elements are created. The positions of the pieces in relation to each other is the same in the two rooms. But the spaces are different, both in terms of measurements as well as orientation. The smaller room  is a kind of distortion – a foreshortened representation as it were – of the larger.

The effect of that proportional modulation is considerable. There is something mysterious about the relationship between the two basically identical configurations. As a viewer, one is actually always in two rooms at the same time; physically one walks through the one field, but mentally one is also in the other to some extent. In this confusing situation, the viewer becomes the focus.