2023-04-21 16:21:45
“Hope Paralyzes Me”… Identity Games and Masks
The works of the American artist Ronnie Horn (1955) make life easier for anyone who stands in front of her, including the life of an art critic. The spirit found in her artwork, the roughness, the elegance, the sharpness, the irony, in addition to her masks and identity games, constitute an opportunity to enter a global area, not in the physical sense of the word, but in the temporal sense.
The visitor coming to the “Putin Center” in the Spanish city of Santander, to attend her art exhibition “Hope Paralyzes Me”, which opened on the first of this month and continues until the tenth of next September, will find enough time to remember and think regarding childhood, the stutters of the first readings, and the period of adolescence, the long pauses in front of mirrors, the feeling of losing parents, the first moments of love and pain, even the scars; Those moments when we are nothing but the remains of life. This is how Horn puts her stamp on all these experiences, and expresses herself in her exhibited works, as an existential and secret sexual prism.
The works displayed and distributed in a unique way in the center’s galleries reinforce the American artist’s idea of the meaning of existence in the present moment, without neglecting the external space and its transformations. In this spirit, the exhibition invites us to relax and pay attention to the game of dualities and contradictions that are presented before us in each room, in an experimental attempt to create a deep dialogue between space and light, water and stillness found in the artist’s works.
The exhibition covers three decades of Horn’s career and includes 400 new drawings
The works on display cover three decades of Horn’s career, through photographs, drawings, sculptures and improvisations. All appear conceptual in nature, as the New York artist strains to explore the transformative nature of identity’s relationship to place. In addition, the artist is presenting for the first time a series of four hundred drawings that play a documentary role, as she used them to record notes and daily events that prominently illustrate the artist’s sensitivity and her own stroke.
Perhaps one of the most frequently discussed themes in the artist’s paintings is the concept of solitude, and there is no doubt that this goes back to the experience of traveling through the remote landscapes of Iceland in 1975. The themes of water and weather also feature prominently in the exhibition, as Horn exploits their changeability and their mysterious nature in order to link them to the concept of The ever-changing identity, which cannot be fixed or stable. Despite all this, the American artist does not hide her need for darkness, or to not get used to the light, or to get used to adapting her vision at night.
It is worth noting that Ronnie Horn is an American artist born in New York in 1955. Over forty years, she has developed her creative work in a variety of media, including photography, sculpture, drawing, and installations. Currently working and living in her home city. It was shown in several European countries, most recently Paris and Spain.
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