Fascination with Iceland inspires American artist

American artist Roni Horn is reluctant to go to Australia where she has had two shows but she can’t seem to get enough of Iceland and its austere landscapes.

Her solo exhibition opened on August 11th in the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. “Australia just doesn’t appeal to me in terms of the global thing,” she says. “Between America, Australia and England, they all share similar limitations.”

Horn left America for the first time when she was 19. She flew to Iceland in 1974 and hitchhiked around the island. The landscape, weather and lack of people as well as the lack of commercialism, enthralled her. She says both the isolation and the landscapes have influenced her work.

“Iceland still has me completely hooked and that takes a lot of time,” Horn said.
In 2000, Horn mounted a permanent installation at the University of Akureyri. “Some Thames” includes 80 photographs of water placed in strategic locations around campus. The flow of water in the spaces, mimics the movement of students and their learning at the university.

One of her works includes a hundred pictures of a woman bathing in pools around Iceland. She says that one image is never enough and that her main interest is in the space and place between things, between images.

Roni Horn was born in 1955 in New York and graduated with a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and later from Yale University with a MFA. She has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Dia Center for the Arts in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago.