Born in Ohio, Jenny Holzer originally worked with abstract painting and printmaking. In the 1970s while in New York, she began to work with texts as a medium. Since then, she became largely known for her compilation series of statements and aphorisms such as Truisms and Survival. Also, the use of text-based LED and light projections allowed Holzer to reach a larger audience looking for new ways to construct contemporary narratives to include commercial media. While language always functioned as Holzer’s main medium, the physical lives of her work question how mass communication affects societies and communities. She was the first artist to install a large electronic sign on the Spectacular board at Times Square, New York to disorient the usual rece ption of news, advertising and artworks. Holzer also configured LED signs into sculptural arrangements that derange architectural space and thoughtfully complicate a viewer’s relationship to place.
As well as writing her own 13 series of texts between 1977 and 2001, Holzer worked with literary texts written by great authors and poets. Ever since she initiated the light projection series, she began to borrow texts written by other writers including the Polish Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska. Introduced in this exhibition, Talking Politics (2008) is one of the two prints which incorporate her poem “Children of Our Age” displayed over the facade of City Hall in London. For the New York City projection series. You Will Kill/I Forget (2006) has combined “The Valley of the Beasts” from the Miracle Maker by Fadhil AI-Azzawi and “Back/from the Frick, The Weather” by an American poet James Schuyler. Through the use of language and text, her light projections point to the inescapability of politics which forms a central theme in Holzer’s work.
