Jenny Holzer
Opening reception: Friday, December 10, 5:30 pm
Kukje gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of Jenny Holzer (1950~) who has presented her astringent ideas, arguments, and sorrows in public places and international exhibitions, including the Neue Nationalgalerie and Reichstag in Berlin, and the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao for more than twenty-five years.
Her medium, whether formulated as a t-shirt, as a plaque, or as an LED sign, always is writing, and the public dimension is integral to the delivery of her work. Starting in the late 1970s with the posters that Holzer pasted on buildings in New York City, and up to her recent xenon projections on landscape and architecture, her practice has rivaled ignorance and violence with humor, kindness, and moral courage.
Holzer, born 1950 in Gallipolis, Ohio, received a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from Ohio University in 1972 and an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1975. She received the Leone d’Oro for her American pavilion installation at the 1990 Venice Biennale, was the recipient of the 2002 Kaiserring from the city of Goslar, Germany, and was awarded the Public Art Network Annual Award by Americans for the Arts in 2004. Holzer lives and works in upstate New York.
Holzer began to use text in her work while attending Ohio University. An abstract painter while at RISD, she shifted to public projects and works that were “sublime and impressive.” Holzer moved to New York City in 1976 and enrolled in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and there created the first Truisms, a series of one-liners on posters pasted anonymously around the city.
Holzer’s practice includes installations with electronic LED displays that are attentive to architecture, monuments and memorials; and since 1996, large-scale xenon projections of text on buildings and landscape. She has realized projections in Florence, Rome, Venice, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Oslo, Paris, Bordeaux, Berlin, Washington, New York City and Miami.
Holzer’s recent publications include Jenny Holzer: Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin (2001), Jenny Holzer: Xenon (2001) and Truth Before Power, a catalog published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name at Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2004. For more information, please contact the gallery.