To get to Illa del Rey, on the northeastern side of Menorca, a short boat ride is necessary. This brief journey sets the stage for an immersion into a complete universe in which architecture, landscape, and art coalesce seamlessly. The idyllic Mediterranean island is home to one of Hauser & Wirth’s locations where, thanks to the architectural vision of Argentinian architect Luis Laplace and a garden by Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf, every facet of the experience becomes a singular expression.
Occupying the south gallery are works by New York-based artist Roni Horn. Here the artist’s iconic sculptures engage in a harmonious dialogue with the light and the surrounding nature. It’s a surprisingly ideal setting for experiencing Horn’s ongoing reflections on identity, meaning, and perception.
In the main space, one encounters Untitled (“A witch is more lovely than thought in the mountain rain.”) (2018), a collection of nine circular sculptures crafted from fused glass. Horn began making these works in the 1990s, employing a process of casting glass into molds and allowing it to cool over several months, resulting in a rough exterior texture juxtaposed with an exceedingly smooth and uniform top surface.
Regarding her glass sculptures, Horn herself has remarked, “What fascinates me has a lot to do with the essence of something that has one appearance but is really something completely different.” These sculptures appear to undergo constant metamorphosis in relation to the external environment, the architecture, and the visitor. Another significant factor influencing the activation of these sculptures is the external light, which, in the context of Menorca, plays a pivotal role in creating a seeming instability between solidity and fluidity, opacity and transparency.
Literature is at the core of Horn’s practice: the sculptures from “Key and Cue” (1994–ongoing) feature the first lines of poems by American poet Emily Dickinson — a figure to whom the artist has dedicated various series before. Take Key and Cue No. 419 (1994/2003), which reads “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark—” from Dickinson’s eponymous poem of 1862: the three-dimensional cast-plastic letters are exposed on all four faces of the aluminum bar. While the main face clearly displays the sentence, the lateral faces allude to minimalism and even suggest barcodes. The artist invites us to contemplate text as image, language as sculpture devoid of fixed meaning: “I don’t think of the object, the material thing or what is produced as the endpoint of a work. The aspiration is always the experience, which means the audience, the individual, is integral to the value of the work.”
Horn, fascinated by the mythological and economic importance of gold, has dedicated a series of works to this theme. Double Mobius V2 (2009/2018), crafted from pure gold, presents two ribbons in the form of a Möbius strip — a geometric shape that appears to have two faces but ultimately possesses just one. By positioning the gold sculpture at eye level so viewers may truly experience the material, the work strips away the cultural associations attached to gold, allowing the audience to appreciate the element in an intimate and unconventional form.
Uncertainty pervades Horn’s work. In a final, smaller room is Black Asphere 9 (1988), a work crafted from copper that initially appears to be a sphere but, as the name suggests, is in fact nonsymmetrical across one axis. Horn states that this piece is a self-portrait, referencing the artist’s experience of androgyny and resistance to binary labels.
“The mountains grow unnoticed” recites one of the aluminum bars from “Key and Cue,” serving as yet another invitation from Horn to reflect on the questions that arise from the works on view, but without ever offering definitive answers. The quiet and peaceful island of Menorca, which appears almost like a dream in the golden sunlight that bathes it, is imbued with restlessness and potential answers.
