Double Mobius includes four key artworks from Roni Horn’s multi-disciplinary oeuvre. Horn’s practice, which includes sculpture, photography, works on paper, and bookmaking, often addresses issues of identity, gender, and androgyny, while crafting complex relationships between the viewer and the artwork. Horn’s materials are handled with both technical virtuosity and sensitivity and assume metaphorical qualities and remarkable visual power.

Such is the case with Double Mobius, 2009, the artwork from which the exhibition borrows its title. Though Horn has been fascinated by the mythological and economic significance of gold since childhood, she has made only three sculptures using it in her four-decade-long career: Gold Field, 1980-82; Paired Gold Mats, for Ross and Felix, 1994-95; and Double Mobius, 2009, shown here.

Double Mobius, unlike earlier gold sculptures, positions the material at eye level so viewers can experience its “simple physical reality,” as Horn refers to it. Installing the sculpture in daylight exposes the artwork to the shifting effects of light and weather. The pairing of two potentially identical objects has been a longtime theme in the Horn’s practice, and Double Mobius, takes the doubling aspect to new level; these ribbons are arranged in the form of a mobius strip (a geometrical form that appears to two-sided but confounding has only one) to simultaneously give the impression of intimacy and infinity.

About:

Roni Horn (b. 1955, New York, NY) is an artist living and working in New York, NY. Horn received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale University. Horn has received the CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts, several NEA fellowships, and a Guggenheim fellowship. She has had one-person exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Dia Center for the Arts, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial (1991, 2004); Documenta (1992); and Venice Biennale (1997), among others.