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Lot Essay
‘In the River Thames, in the Arctic iceberg, in your drinking glass, in that drop of rain, on that frosty window pane, in your eyes, and in every microscopic, microcosmic part of you (and me), all waters converge’ (R. Horn).
Executed in 1999, Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) stems from Roni Horn’s celebrated series of fifteen photo-lithographs depicting a small area of the River Thames. Closely zoomed to the point of abstraction, it captures a single moment in the water’s never-ending flow, freeze-framing the refractions, reflections and undulations produced by its changeable current. The tiny numbers dotted over the water’s surface relate to footnotes printed along the bottom of the image; each of these offers musings on the significance of the river, interspersing the artist’s own stream of consciousness with references to film, music and literature. Along with the artist’s book Another Water (2000) and the installation piece Some Thames (2000), Still Water was part of a larger project commissioned by the Public Arts Development Trust in London and Minetta Brook in New York to create new works inspired by the Thames and Hudson waterfronts. As the artist explains, ‘The Thames has this incredible moodiness, and that’s what the camera picks up. It has these vertical changes and it moves very quickly. It’s actually a very dangerous river and you sense that just by looking at it ... every photograph is wildly different – even though you could be photographing the same thing from one minute to the next. It’s almost got the complexity of a portrait’ (R. Horn, quoted in ‘Roni Horn Interview: Water’, Art:21 – Art in the Twenty-First Century, https://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/horn/clip1.html). The series was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art the year after its creation; another work from the sequence was later acquired by Tate, London.
Executed in 1999, Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) stems from Roni Horn’s celebrated series of fifteen photo-lithographs depicting a small area of the River Thames. Closely zoomed to the point of abstraction, it captures a single moment in the water’s never-ending flow, freeze-framing the refractions, reflections and undulations produced by its changeable current. The tiny numbers dotted over the water’s surface relate to footnotes printed along the bottom of the image; each of these offers musings on the significance of the river, interspersing the artist’s own stream of consciousness with references to film, music and literature. Along with the artist’s book Another Water (2000) and the installation piece Some Thames (2000), Still Water was part of a larger project commissioned by the Public Arts Development Trust in London and Minetta Brook in New York to create new works inspired by the Thames and Hudson waterfronts. As the artist explains, ‘The Thames has this incredible moodiness, and that’s what the camera picks up. It has these vertical changes and it moves very quickly. It’s actually a very dangerous river and you sense that just by looking at it ... every photograph is wildly different – even though you could be photographing the same thing from one minute to the next. It’s almost got the complexity of a portrait’ (R. Horn, quoted in ‘Roni Horn Interview: Water’, Art:21 – Art in the Twenty-First Century, https://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/horn/clip1.html). The series was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art the year after its creation; another work from the sequence was later acquired by Tate, London.