For her first London solo exhibition in a decade, Roni Horn returns with Seizure of Hope, a new presentation at Hauser & Wirth bringing together over 45 works on paper alongside a rare cast-glass sculpture. The exhibition centres on Horn’s longstanding engagement with language, repetition and the instability of meaning.
Drawing has remained a central activity throughout Horn’s practice for almost four decades, functioning less as preparation and more as a fundamental mode of thinking. In Seizure of Hope, language itself becomes both subject and material as the artist repeatedly writes and rewrites the phrase:
“I am paralyzed with hope.”
The statement originates from a performance by American comedian Maria Bamford (Now a film) and first appeared in Horn’s large-scale installation LOG (March 22, 2019–May 17, 2020), a sprawling work composed of 406 individual drawings functioning as a kind of visual record of the world around her.
Horn has described the phrase as:
“a poignant connection to our time with regards to politics and the environment and now, of course, in relation to the pandemic.”
Across the new works, the sentence unfolds like a continuous stream of thought spilling across the page. Written and repeatedly drawn over with wax crayon, the words shift between clarity and disappearance. Letters dissolve, bleed and blur as if submerged beneath water, hovering between legibility and abstraction.
The changing styles of handwriting introduce multiple voices and identities into the work, encouraging viewers to locate themselves somewhere within the text. With more than forty-five examples from the series installed together, visitors become physically immersed in the repeated statement itself. The accumulation of drawings mirrors the sentiment embedded in the phrase: hope gathering to such an extent that it becomes overwhelming, reaching a point of emotional paralysis.
Accompanying the drawings is Horn’s cast-glass sculpture Untitled (“What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?”) (2022), a rare example from her sculptural practice. Taking the form of a cube, the work sits between material solidity and visual fluidity, its polished surface resembling still water.
Water has long occupied a central position within Horn’s thinking. The artist has previously stated:
“I am fascinated by this idea of water as a form of perpetual relation, not so much a substance but a thing whose identity was based on its relation to other things […] Rather than an object, water becomes a metaphor for consciousness—of time, of physicality, of the human condition.”
Like the written works, the sculpture resists a fixed state. Light conditions, weather and changing reflections continually alter its appearance, placing it in a condition of perpetual transformation. Throughout the exhibition, both language and material remain unstable — shifting, reforming and refusing singular meaning.
Coinciding with the exhibition, Hauser & Wirth Publishers will release a limited-edition artist book also titled Seizure of Hope. The publication reproduces Horn’s drawings through a series of detailed gatefolds and becomes the latest in an ongoing sequence of artist books that extends the artist’s investigation into language, perception and emotional experience.
Rather than presenting hope as certainty or optimism, Seizure of Hope treats it as something more complex — a force capable of accumulation, distortion and profound emotional weight.
Roni Horn. Seizure of Hope, 21st May – 1st August 2026 Hauser & Wirth London
About the artist
Roni Horn’s work consistently generates uncertainty to thwart closure in her work. Important across her
oeuvre is her longstanding interest to the protean nature of identity, meaning, and perception, as well as the notion of doubling; issues which continue to propel Horn’s practice.
Select recent exhibitions include: ‘Roni Horn’, at Dia Beacon, Beacon NY (2025); ‘Roni Horn. Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death,’ at Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany (2024); ‘Roni Horn. The Detour of Identity,’ at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark (2024); ‘Roni Horn: I am paralyzed with hope’, Centro Botín, Santander, Spain (2022); ‘Roni Horn: A dream dreamt in a dreaming world is not really a dream… but a dream not dreamt is’ at He Art Museum, Shunde, China (2023); ‘Félix González-Torres / Roni Horn’, Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, France (2022); ‘Roni Horn: When You See Your Reflection in Water, Do You Recognize the Water in You?’, Pola Museum, Hakone, Japan (2021 – 2022); and ‘Roni Horn. You are the Weather’, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland (2020).
Horn’s works are featured in numerous major international institutions and collections including the Guggenheim Museum, New York NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York NY; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago IL; Tate Modern, London, England; Kunsthalle Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany; Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.
