Works by Concept Artists over the past four years Jenny Holzer has become indelibly associated with New York’s cityscape through its departure from street signs, electronic billboards and outdoor facades. But Holzer, perhaps best known for her incisive Truisms series (89-05), not just a political messenger or iconic. The polyhyphenated and self-described “Beauty Hound” is also a painter, engraver, architecture lover, and tech-obsessed—though she will humbly reject many of these descriptions. Working in a variety of media between public and private spaces and between language and image, Holzer demonstrates her fascination with the full sensory experience of contemporary life.
As Catherine Liu once observed in Artforum In doing so, Holzer “reconstructs a new sense organ around an internal visual apparatus: […] she conveys the difficulty of trying to live inside one’s skin in a culture that seeks to annihilate interiority.”
Her latest exhibition” “Crazy Words” will be on view at Hauser & Wirth in New York from September 8 to October 09 (with PEN America’s outdoor light projection at Rockefeller Center), highlights Holzer’s and vice versa with New Media collaborations and her unique passion for intimacy and beautiful
forms – all of which happens when the word ‘B’ is most often mocked moment as an aesthetic remnant of outdated masculinist politics. See, for example, one of Holzer’s earliest installations, The Blue Room (90), the entire interior of the studio was painted white and covered in blue washes to create the illusion of a sheer surface; or her later more spectacular, brighter text projects, since935 INFORMATION TO THE PUBLIC Flashing on Spectacolor billboards in Times Square. For Holzer, it is not enough to simply read these texts, which often scroll into the masonry of gigantic skyscrapers and historic landmarks; instead, a mixture of light and shadow, soft and hard, collective and individual perception, produces A comprehensive experience of beauty. This attention to the vividness of landscape, space, and resolution is also reflected in her abstract paintings, whose portfolio is included in Words of Madness. Their leafy surfaces, angular lines and occasional snippets of text capture Holzer’s intimate epitome of his longing for the ineffable and concrete.
