Roni Horn returns to Hauser & Wirth London for her first solo exhibition in the city in a decade with Seizure of Hope (from May 21st to August 1st, 2026). This intimate yet far-reaching presentation explores the interplay between language, repetition and perception. In the gallery rooms, Horn’s drawings are displayed alongside sculptures and one of her iconic glass cubes. Here, drawing is treated less as image-making and more as a sustained act of thought made visible.
Language, repetition, and the fragile architecture of meaning
The exhibition centres on Horn’s new series Seizure of Hope, works on paper built around the phrase “I am paralyzed with hope,” written, overwritten, and pressed into varying states of erosion. Drawn from comedian Maria Bamford’s monologue and first introduced in Horn’s earlier installation LOG, the sentence becomes a pulse-like structure—repetitive, unsettled, quietly insistent.
In these Roni Horn drawings, repetition refuses resolution. Words blur, smudge, and accumulate like thought under strain, where writing behaves less as communication than as a form of emotional scaffolding.
Water in art: Horn’s glass cube and unstable perception
Alongside the works on paper sits Horn’s cast-glass sculpture Untitled (“What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?”) (2022), a rare presence within her sculptural output. Its cubic form appears exact yet elusive, catching and dispersing light like a surface caught between stillness and motion.
For Horn, water becomes a way of reading perception itself—shifting, relational, never held in place for long. The glass surface behaves with the same instability, responding to light and position as if it were briefly liquid.
Extension beyond the gallery
Published by Hauser & Wirth Publishers, the accompanying edition Seizure of Hope (2026) carries the works into print with exacting clarity. Rather than serving as documentation, the book continues the logic of the exhibition—another surface where language, repetition, and variation persist in circulation.
Untitled (What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?), 2022
