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Roni Horn is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary art, renowned for a multidisciplinary practice that encompasses sculpture, photography, drawing, installation and writing.

Born in New York in 1955, Horn studied at the Rhode Island School of Design before completing an MFA at Yale University. Since the mid-1970s, she has maintained a profound connection with Iceland, with the country’s landscape, climate and shifting conditions having fundamentally shaped her work. Her acclaimed To Place book series explores this relationship through photographs of Iceland's landscapes, ice, water and people.

Working across diverse materials — including cast glass, aluminium, copper, pigment and water — Horn investigates the instability of meaning and perception. Her sculptures reward sustained looking, often revealing subtle shifts through changes in light, viewpoint and environment. This is exemplified in her sculpture Untitled (“The yes without the no”) (2009–2010), which juxtaposes raw and highly finished glass to challenge binary oppositions such as rough and smooth, weight and lightness, and fluidity and solidity. In 2024, the work sold for US$1.8 million at Christie’s — more than double its low estimate.

Language is equally central to Horn’s practice. In the 1990s, she created text-based sculptures embedding quotations by writers including Emily Dickinson into aluminium forms. Her Hack Wit drawings dismantled and reconfigured idioms and proverbs into nonsensical expressions, using mirroring, pairing and folded paper to ask questions about meaning and language.

Throughout her career, Horn has examined the fluid relationship between people, objects and the natural world. Her work has been the subject of major exhibitions at leading institutions, including the Tate Modern, Fondation Beyeler, Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art. In 2007, she completed Vatnasafn / Library of Water, a permanent installation in Stykkishólmur, Iceland, bringing together columns of glacial meltwater.

Resisting easy categorisation, Horn moves between abstraction and representation, language and image, permanence and flux. Across her celebrated cast-glass sculptures, photography and works on paper, she returns to questions of doubling, reflection and identity, showing how meaning is never fixed but continually shaped by context, perception and time. As Horn once observed: ‘integrating difference is the basis of identity, not the exclusion of it. You are this and this and that.’