‍Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death is an extensive solo exhibition by the influential American artist Roni Horn with over one hundred works ranging from the beginnings of her artistic career to the present day.

Roni Horn's work ranges from photography to drawing and artist book to sculpture and installation. Behind this openness is the artist's understanding that everything in the world is changeable and cannot be subordinated to any fixed attribution.

The exhibition at Museum Ludwig in Cologne looks at this idea on the basis of three recurring themes in Horn's work: nature, identity and language.

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The title of the exhibition is based on a quote from Patrick Henry, a representative of the American independence movement in the 18th century. He ended a speech with the words: “Give me freedom or death!”

Roni Horn is not so much interested in the context of the original quote, but more in its pictorial power.

She adopts the structure of Henry's well-known saying, but exchanges “freedom” for “paradox” and equates the two terms and their meanings with it. For them, the paradox is access to ambiguity; a state in which things can contain their opposites.

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At the entrance to the exhibition, visitors are welcomed by This is Me, This is You (1997—2000). Forty-eight framed photographs showing the artist's niece in her youth are presented on two opposite walls.

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The portraits were taken over the course of two years. Each photo has a counterpart on the opposite wall, which only differs in minimal changes that occur in fractions of a second.

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Horn explained in an interview in 1989: “Due to the condition of being double, the form of a couple actively refuses the opportunity to be experienced as one thing in itself.” The use of doubles and pairs also takes into account Horn's conviction that identity is fluid.

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Yilmaz Dziewior, curator of the exhibition, comments: “Roni Horn began exploring fluid representations of gender long before terms such as genderqueer and nonbinary entered public discourse. In her (self-)portraits, you see a person who fluctuates between genders without needing to find a specific term to describe this mode of being. She shows humans as organisms constantly manifesting themselves in a state of perpetual transformation. While extremely precise and highly aesthetic, her objects, photographs, and drawings have a liberating and emancipatory potential because they are often intangible and indefinable.”

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Walking through the exhibition, visitors encounter drawings from the late 1970s that have never been exhibited before, as well as a selection of color pigment drawings created between 1983 and 2018.

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The photographic works presented include the groundbreaking work Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) (1999), which creates a portrait of the Thames in southern England in fifteen photographs,

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a.k.a. (2008/2009), a series that shows the artist at various moments of her life,

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as well as Portrait of an Image (with Isabelle Huppert) (2005/2006) with recordings in which the French actress appears in various of her film roles.

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The sculptures in the exhibition include works from the series When Dickinson Shut Her Eyes (1993—2008), in which Horn takes up poetry by Emily Dickinson,

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Gold Field (1980/1994), which consists of 99.99 percent gold leaf,

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and Untitled (“The tiniest piece of mirror is always the whole mirror”) (2022), a ten-piece piece of cast glass that reflects the environment.

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The exhibition Roni Horn. Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death can be seen at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne until August 11.

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The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive catalog with contributions from Yilmaz Dziewior, Zoë Lescaze, Andrew Märkle, Isabel de Naverán and Kerstin Stakemeier.

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About Roni Horn

Roni Horn (born 1955 in New York) studied at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence and at Yale University, New Haven. Solo exhibitions of her work have included at Kunsthalle Basel (1995), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2003), Tate Modern, London, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (both 2009), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2010), Hamburger Kunsthalle (2011), Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (2014), De Pont Foundation, Tilburg (1994), 1998, 2016), at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2016, 2020), at the Glenstone Museum, Potomac (2017), at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2018), at the Menil Drawing Institute, Houston (2018/2019), in Pola Museum of Art, Hakone (2021/22), at Centro Botín, Santander, and at He Art Museum, Guangdong (both 2023). Horn recently took part in group exhibitions at Museum Brandhorst, Munich, and Kunsthaus Zürich (both 2023), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2021) and Manifesta 14 in Pristina (2022). She has received various prizes and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (1990), the Alpert Award (1998) and the Joan Miró Prize (2013).

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About the exhibition

Curator: Yilmaz Dziewior

Curatorial assistance: Kerstin Renerig, Leonore Spemann

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Photos via Museum Ludwig

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