Roni Horn, born on the 25th of September, has produced a body of work involving drawings, photography, installations, sculpture and works based on literature, all questioning and generating uncertainty. 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. Central to her work are nature, humankind, the weather, literature and poetry.
Horn’s ice-blue sculpture ‘Untitled’ (‘The peeled white body of the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; …Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous din’), is like water, transforms in accordance with its surrounding elements, gradations of sunlight and shadow activate the work.
The conceptual artist and photographer Andrea Hamilton seeks to capture the maximum chromatic variation of the sea. Her documentation of the colour she saw at a particular moment at the same location during the day, resulted in the creation of a unique archive of 20 years. Hamilton’s work places light on the seascape, reflected and refracted to respond to pigments in nature. She sets constant parameters of location and distance of tripod from the water’s edge, centring the frame on the horizon line, which has as a result a collection of monochrome and duochrome seascape photographs.
Image 1: Roni Horn, ‘Untitled’, 2014 - 2016 © Roni Horn, courtesy Hauser & Wirth, London
Image 2: Andrea Hamilton, ‘Library of Sea Colour’, 2000 - present © Andrea Hamilton