RONI HORN | DOUBLE 2.24 A AND 2.24 B

Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner in December 1989

“[Horn’s] works on paper from the 1980s… tend to contain uneven, enclosed shapes in glowing color… When two very similar shapes are combined it would be reasonable to think they might be in a symmetrical relation with each other. It is all the more striking, then, that a pair of shapes… fail to have the effect of symmetry… Instead one functions as the double of the other and has the reverse effect: disequilibrium. Two drawings may be in some respects nearly identical, but the drift of the colored vertical further to the right in the right-hand work becomes all the more dramatic as a consequence. As the poet Paul Celan succinctly lamented: ‘Unreadable this/world. All doubles’…The effect is cumulative and greater than its parts.”

(Briony Fer, “Complete with Missing Parts,” Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, p.28, catalogue for exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art)