RONI HORN, De Pont Foundation for Contemporary Art, 1994

Roni Horn
De Pont Foundation for Contemporary Art, Tilburg, 1994
Published for the exhibition, 5 March–3 July 1994
Softcover, offset printed · 27 × 21 cm · 79 pp.
Colour and black-and-white throughout
Essay by Nancy Spector, "Roni Horn: Being Double"
Dutch and English

Published for Horn's 1994 exhibition at De Pont, this catalogue brings together the installation Pair Field with selections from her ongoing To Place project. Horn had first shown at De Pont when the museum opened in 1992, when Pair Field was installed there — eighteen pairs of solid copper and stainless-steel sculptures, each pair identical but physically separated across the space. De Pont subsequently became an important institutional home for Horn's work.

The publication is particularly strong as an object. A photograph of the Icelandic landscape wraps from front to back cover; inside, sculpture, landscape, architecture and water appear repeatedly in pairs and sequences. One spread reduces the forms of Pair Field to an almost typological grid of copper and steel objects; elsewhere a photograph of a swimming pool and an Icelandic ice formation are placed opposite one another. The book doesn't simply reproduce Horn's work — it adopts her interest in doubling, proximity and difference as its own editorial structure.

By the early 1990s Iceland had already become central to Horn's practice. Rather than treating landscape as subject matter, she used it as a changing measure of identity, perception and place — ideas that move between her sculpture, photography, drawing and artist books, and that To Place would continue to develop across subsequent volumes.