Jenny Holzer
°1950, Gallipolis (US) – lives and works in New York (US)
Jenny Holzer is an American conceptual and installation artist whose work deploys text in public spaces across an array of media, including electronic and LED signs, carved stone, billboards, and printed materials. Closely aligned with the feminist art movement, Holzer’s oeuvre provokes public debate and illuminates social and political injustice. Celebrated for her inimitable use of language and interventions in the public sphere, Holzer creates a powerful tension between the realms of feeling and knowledge, with a practice that encompasses both individual and collective experiences of power and violence, vulnerability and tenderness.
Since 1996 Holzer has been using light projection – in which a powerful film projector casts scrolling texts onto architecture or a landscape – as another way of presenting texts in the public realm. The texts and light are dramatic but unobtrusive, adapting to varied projection surfaces, from the mountains and ski jump in Lillehammer to the Pyramide du Louvre in Paris. In recent years, Holzer has returned to painting, making reference to Abstract Expressionism and Suprematism and reinforcing the continued relationship of art with politics.
(courtesy of Hauser & Wirth)
Jenny Holzer – Protect me from what I want, from Survival (1983–85), Times Square, New York in 1985 (Photo by John Marchael)
Jenny Holzer – YOUVOTE, 2020
Jenny Holzer – Abuse of Power Comes As No Surprise, from the series Truisms T-shirts, 1980-Ongoing (Photo by Lisa Kahane)
Jenny Holzer – Living- Some days you wake up and immediately..., 1980-82
Jenny Holzer – Men don’t protect you anymore, from The Survival series, 1983-1985
Jenny Holzer has exhibited worldwide. Recent solo exhibitions include Fondation Beyeler, Basel; Whitney Museum, New York; Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montreal; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Group exhibitions include Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museo D’Arte Moderna de Sao Paolo; Macba, Barcelona; and MoMA, New York. Jenny Holzer was the first woman to represent the United States in the Venice Biennale in 1990, for which she received the Golden Lion.
Jenny Holzer is represented by the following galleries;
click through to discover more of her work.
Sprüth Magers, Berlin / London / Los Angeles
Hauser & Wirth, Zurich / London / New York / Hong Kong / …
You can also discover more of Jenny Holzer’s work on her own website.
Jenny Holzer – light projection, Louvre Pyramid, Paris in 2009, (Photo by Lili Holzer-Glier)
Jenny Holzer – Forty-second Street Art Project, 1993, Times Square, New York (Photo by Maggie Hopp)
Jenny Holzer – In the Garden, 2015, from The Collected Poems 1957–1987 (Photo by Ben Hider)
Jenny Holzer – For the Guggenheim, installation view at the Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2008 (Photo by Kristopher McKay)
