We are pleased to announce the placement of "Remembered Words — (Barbarella)" (2012–13) by Roni Horn into an important private collection.
This multi-part work, executed in gouache, watercolor, graphite, and gum arabic on paper with each sheet measuring 38.1 × 27.9 cm, belongs to one of the most intimate and linguistically searching bodies of work in Roni Horn's practice. In the "Remembered Words" series, Horn isolates individual words from specific cinematic sources and commits them to paper in a handmade, materially dense form that stands in deliberate contrast with the slick cultural surfaces from which they are drawn. Each sheet offers a single word to the viewer: not as information, not as definition, but as a physical object, weighted, ambiguous, capable of being inhabited rather than merely read.
The source for this group of works is "Barbarella" (dir. Roger Vadim, 1968), the French science fiction film starring Jane Fonda whose camp theatricality, sexual frankness, and spectacular visual excess have made it a persistent reference point in the history of gender, pop culture, and desire. Horn's engagement with this material is characteristically oblique: extracted from their narrative context, the film's words become strange and mutable, their meanings loosened from plot and character and made available for new forms of attention. The encounter between Horn's rigorously material practice and the pleasure-saturated world of "Barbarella" generates a productive tension between seriousness and play, between the handmade and the cinematic, between the legibility of language and its dissolution into pure surface.
Born in 1955, Roni Horn has developed over more than four decades one of the most philosophically ambitious and formally inventive practices in contemporary art, encompassing sculpture, photography, drawing, and artist's books. Her work is held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Collection, the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and numerous other major institutions.
Peder Lund Art Advisory Associates negotiated and finalized this acquisition on behalf of a distinguished private collection.