Roni Horn (American, b.1955) works with sculpture, photography, installation, and works on paper, exploring concepts of transience and viewers’ interactions with art in site-specific pieces. Born in New York, Horn studied art at the Rhode Island School of Design and received an MFA from Yale University in 1978. After graduation, she began visiting Iceland frequently; inspired by the ethereal atmosphere and perceived timelessness of the environment, its landscape strongly influenced the direction of her work. Horn has consistently worked as a draftsman throughout her career, creating abstracted works on paper that elicit her view of drawing as the fundamental way of articulating relationships between forms.

She often uses drawings as well as text for the foundations of her other works—which range from sculptures covered with lines from Emily Dickenson poems to photographs and artists’ books—chronicling her visits to Iceland. In her site-specific public works, she arranges sculptures or installations to prompt questions regarding the viewer’s relationship to the piece and to his or her surroundings, in pieces that explore properties of water or bring basalt from Iceland under the feet of daily urban commuters. Horn has exhibited her work at the Whitney Biennial in New York, documenta in Kassel, the Venice Biennale, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Kunstmuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. She currently lives and works in New York and Iceland.