Guggenheim New York is hosting Jenny Holzer’s solo exhibition ‘Jenny Holzer: Light Line’, featuring reimagining the artist’s 1989 landmark artwork. Holzer created a spiraling LED display for her Guggenheim Museum exhibition almost 35 years ago (in 1989), and now her landmark artwork returns to the museum. Once again Holzer displays her installation across Frank Lloyd Wright-designed rotunda as, the new installation climbs all six ramps up to the building’s oculus, realizing the artist’s original vision.
The LED sign, blinking while changing colors, fonts, and special effects, was the longest in the world at the time and is considered a masterpiece of text-based art.
This time, Holzer has treated the entire museum as an installation, placing pieces in unexpected spaces, such as outdoor planters and a restroom. Once again, Holzer is pressing issues of our time, from climate justice to women’s rights, from corruption to war.
With this new manifestation, she transforms the building with an updated and expanded display of scrolling texts, featuring language from her iconic series, such as Truisms and Inflammatory Essays.
The artwork is also an ambitious research project. Guggenheim conservators reverse-engineered the 1989 LED hardware and computer program for this installation.
Light Line also features a selection of Holzer’s works from the 1970s to the present day, including paintings, works on paper, plaques, and stone pieces. Lee Quiñones, one of the originators of street art and a longtime collaborator of Holzer’s, has graffitied the walls of the museum’s High Gallery over the artist’s colorful Inflammatory Essays posters.
Holzer’s For the Guggenheim is displayed on the building’s facade every evening at sundown through May 20. The light projection illuminates the architecture with poems and eyewitness accounts that speak to the necessity of peace.
An artist’s book, titled TRACE, also accompanies the exhibition.
This solo exhibition reflects how Holzer’s use of the written word throughout her career has long captivated audiences worldwide. The messaging is timely and offers audiences the opportunity to encounter the extraordinary, the political, the mundane, and the provocative through the artist’s pioneering approach to technology and language.
The exhibition will last until Sept 11 and the outside LED installation will last until May 20 at Guggenheim New York.
About Jenny Holzer
For more than forty years, Jenny Holzer has presented her astringent ideas, arguments, joys, and sorrows in public places and international exhibitions, including Times Square, the Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim museums in New York and Bilbao, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Her medium—whether a T-shirt, plaque, electronic sign, or stone bench—is writing, and the public dimension is integral to her work. Starting in the 1970s with her New York City street posters and continuing through her recent light projections on landscapes and architecture, her practice has rivaled ignorance and violence with humor, kindness, and courage. Holzer received the Leone d’Oro at the Venice Biennale in 1990, the
World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award in 1996, and the US State Department’s International Medal of Arts in 2017. She lives and works in New York.
