Roni Horn: Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death: Museum Ludwig, Cologne

Mu­se­um Lud­wig is pleased to pre­sent Roni Horn: Give Me Para­dox or Give Me Death, a so­lo ex­hi­bi­tion of works by in­flu­en­tial Amer­i­can artist Roni Horn. The ex­hi­bi­tion in­cludes over 100 works, span­n­ing from the be­gin­n­ing of the artist’s de­cades long ca­reer to pre­sent day. 

Roni Horn's work spans from pho­tog­ra­phy to draw­ing, artist books, sculp­ture, and in­s­tal­la­tion. Be­hind this open­ness lies the artist's un­der­s­tand­ing that ev­ery­thing in the world is mutable and can­not be sub­ject­ed to fixed at­tri­bu­tion. The ex­hi­bi­tion at the Mu­se­um Lud­wig ex­amines this idea through three re­cur­ring themes in Horn's work: na­ture, iden­ti­ty, and lan­guage. 

The ti­tle of the ex­hi­bi­tion is de­rived from a quote by Pa­trick Hen­ry, an ad­vo­cate for Amer­i­can in­de­pen­dence in the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry, who con­clud­ed a speech with the words, “Give me lib­er­ty or give me death!” Roni Horn is more in­ter­est­ed in the vi­su­al pow­er of the quote than its orig­i­nal con­text; in her adap­ta­tion of the struc­ture of Hen­ry’s fa­mous ex­cla­ma­tion, she sub­sti­tutes the word "para­dox" for "lib­er­ty", thus equ­at­ing the mean­ings of both terms. For Horn, para­dox­es are a way to ac­cess am­bi­gu­i­ty, a qual­i­ty in which things may con­tain their op­po­sites.