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.