Tag Archives: books

Roni Horn

17 June 2009 at 6.30pm

Spin: Glasgow’s first visit to The Common Guild to see work by Roni Horn.

Roni Horn‘s work sets up relationships: between images, between words and between object and viewer. This new exhibition, following Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, her major show currently at Tate Modern, brings together a concise group of works that share Horn’s characteristic evocation of the fine line between sameness and difference. Specifically selected with the artist, in response to the particular characteristics of The Common Guild’s grand but domestic gallery spaces, the exhibition also demonstrates the range of forms in which Horn works – photographic installations, drawing, sculpture and books. Its title comes from the work of legendary Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920 – 1977), via a work included in the exhibition, and is suggestive of the many instances of reflection to be found in this coming together of art and place.

The Common Guild is a not-for-profit visual arts organisation, receiving Flexible Funding from the Scottish Arts Council is dedicated to producing a dynamic international programme of contemporary visual art projects, exhibitions, and events. These include gallery-based exhibitions and ephemeral, non-gallery projects, interventions and collaborations. The Common Guild’s temporary home at 21 Woodlands Terrace is a grand, Victorian townhouse to the west of the city centre next to Kelvingrove Park. Exhibitions take place over two floors, including a unique library, designed by artist Andrew Miller, which will include a selection of Roni Horn’s extensive output of artist’s books and catalogues.

Roni Horn lives and works in New York, where she was born in 1955. She received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale University. She has exhibited in major solo exhibitions in Europe and America including at significant institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Dia Center for the Arts, New York and most recently at Tate Modern, Collection Lambert, Avignon, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. The numerous important group exhibitions in which she has participated include the Whitney Biennial exhibitions of 1991 and 2004, Documenta IX in 1992 and the 1997 Venice Biennale. She has worked on artist’s books throughout her career, including the multi-volume To Place.

Spin-Off Trip to Little Sparta

24 July 2005

The sun is shining, the days are long; every now and then, there is the distant sound of police and protestors clashing. It is an appropriately surreal and extreme time to head to Little Sparta. The idyllic sculpture garden, surrounding a wee croft in the southern uplands of Scotland, is studded with references to the philosophical values of the French Revolution and the techniques of modern warfare. It still resonates with the noises of the Little Spartan War 1983 (the Follies War and the French War were to follow later). Finlay clashed with Strathclyde Region over its bureaucratic bungling of a rates dispute; and the sheriff officer and his men staged two raids on the Finlay’s Garden Temple. Although they were repelled by Finlay’s supporters (the Saint-Just Vigilantes) in the first battle, the sheriff and his men succeeded in seizing several works in the second onslaught. Nor was Finlay mellowed by experience – he went on to have further fights ‘on principle’ with the National Trust for Scotland and the French Ministry of Culture, as well as half of the people he ever worked with.

Ian Hamilton Finlay‘s uncompromising commitment to ‘beauty’ and classical rigour may not have won friends, but it did produce the most uniquely distinctive and challenging body of work in Scotland in the last century. Finlay is a concrete poet first and foremost, and has been a prolific collaborator with many different artists, craftspeople and poets with whom he has created an extensive collection of sculptures, prints and books. His public art works are to be found in cities all over the world and many of his works will be on display in three co-ordinated exhibitions in Edinburgh over the summer: at the Ingleby Gallery, Inverleith House and the Scottish Poetry Library. But there is no doubt that the heart and soul of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s work will always be the garden at Little Sparta.

Spin members were invited to join an exclusive bus trip to the garden, to uncover the complex threads and hedonistic delights of Finlay’s work.