The artist Roni Horn considers herself an “off brand” in more ways than one.
“I’m not even sure I’m a visual artist,” she said recently during a visit to her large Manhattan studio, incongruously located in a high-end Chelsea apartment building.
Those statements may sound self-deprecating coming from someone with four solo exhibitions at galleries and museums this spring, an unusual number for any artist.
But Horn, 68, an intellectually peripatetic Conceptualist, has an innate confidence, which may stem from the fact that she does not feel she fits in anywhere, personally or professionally, and never has. So she simply follows her ideas wherever they lead her — what’s the worst that could happen?
The results she achieves seem to have few stylistic similarities. The serene, Minimalist cast-glass sculptures do not seem to be by the same person who produced those playful text-based drawings, or the suites of paired photographs. Sometimes her work reveals her hand; more often it is fabricated to her specifications.
“So much of the art world is about branding, and Roni’s work isn’t that,” said Poul Erik Tojner, the director of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark, the site of one of her upcoming shows.
Her great subject turns out to be the malleability of identity itself, which may help explain why Horn describes an exhibition as a “group show of myself.”
